Jonathan's blog

From an article of the same title by Neela Banerjee in the NY Times:

On a Web site called mysecret.tv, there is the writer who was molested years ago by her baby sitter and who still cannot forgive herself for failing to protect her younger siblings from the same abuse. There is the happy father, businessman and churchgoer who is having a sexual relationship with another man in his church. There is the young woman who shot an abusive boyfriend when she was high on methamphetamine. Then there is this entry: "Years ago I asked my father, ‘How does a daddy justify selling his little girl?' He replied, ‘I needed to pay the rent, put food on the table and I liked having a few coins to jangle in my pocket.' " About a month ago, LifeChurch, an evangelical network with nine locations and based in Edmond, Okla., set up mysecret.tv as a forum for people to confess anonymously on the Internet. The LifeChurch founder, the Rev. Craig Groeschel, said that after 16 years in the ministry he knew that the smiles and eager handshakes that greeted him each week often masked a lot of pain. But the accounts of anguish and guilt that have poured into mysecret.tv have stunned him, Mr. Groeschel said, and affirmed his belief in the need for confession. "We confess to God for forgiveness but to each other for healing," Mr. Groeschel said. "Secrets isolate you, and keep you away from God, from those people closest to you."... Since its inception, mysecret.tv has received more than 150,000 hits and more than 1,500 confessions...

I just went to the site and read a few of the confessions. Interesting stuff. Is some of the power of confession lost when it is anonymous? Probably, since you lose the compassion, understanding, accountability that comes from the one to whom you confess. When you confess to the net, are you confessing to God? Probably.

Here's some video of Finn and Kevin playing with legos and Elliot, Coby, and Grampa B in the pool in Grand Haven.

From an article of the same title by Michael Alison Chandler in The Washington Post:

On June 6, Cheryl Smith took her last $600 and drove her teenage daughter from Baltimore to Severna Park to get an abortion. When they got there, a receptionist told them the clinic had changed hands. The abortion provider had moved a few miles away, she said, but the new clinic would offer a pregnancy test and sonogram for free. The Smiths stayed. After they saw a picture of the fetus at 21 weeks with arms and legs and a face, their thoughts of termination were gone. "As soon as I seen that, I was ready. It wasn't no joke. It was real," Makiba Smith, 16, said. "It was like, he's not born to the world yet, but he is inside of me growing." With its ultrasound machine and its location, the Severna Park Pregnancy Clinic demonstrates two of the most important tactics in an intensifying campaign to woo women away from abortion clinics. Antiabortion organizations in recent years have added medical services to hundreds of Christian-oriented pregnancy counseling centers nationwide. Many of these antiabortion clinics have opened in or near places where women go to end pregnancies... By many accounts, the ultrasound exams have proven effective in convincing women to stay pregnant. A 2005 survey by Care Net, a Sterling-based network of about 1,000 antiabortion pregnancy centers in the United States and Canada, found that 72 percent of women who were initially "strongly leaning" toward abortion decided to carry their pregnancies to term after seeing a sonogram. Fifty percent made the same choice after counseling alone. Such results have led antiabortion forces to buy more ultrasound machines, which can cost as much as $50,000 each. In the past 2 1/2 years, the evangelical organization Focus on the Family, based in Colorado Springs, estimates it has helped 200 pregnancy centers buy the machines... Defending the decision to locate antiabortion pregnancy centers near abortion clinics, Hartshorn said abortion foes are not seeking "to be deceptive or to trick people, but to be right where they are when they are making decisions." Some Feel Deceived But many women say they have felt duped. The National Abortion Federation has received hundreds of calls and e-mails from women who say they went into pregnancy centers with vague or confusing names, many of them found under "abortion services" headings in the phone book. Rather than receiving unbiased counseling on all of their legal options, these women said, they found themselves listening to frightening, sometimes false, information... For Cheryl and Makiba Smith, ending up at the wrong clinic was a mistake they say they are deeply glad to have made. "God sent me to that clinic," Cheryl Smith said.

From an article of the same title (sub-titled Why does the United States keep losing in international sports?) by Robert Weintraub on slate.com:

In the wee hours of Friday morning, another American basketball team met its international Waterloo, losing to Greece in the semifinals of the 2006 FIBA World Championship. This squad was supposed to be a corrective to prior failures, most notably a bronze in the 2004 Olympics and a humbling sixth at the 2002 Worlds. Yet once again, despite a more strategically built team and the Madison Avenue-minted genius of Duke's Mike Krzyzewski, the United States once again came up shy. Cue the recriminations. According to the newspaper columnists and television pundits, the Americans lost because they relied too much on individual talent at the expense of team play. They didn't pay attention to fundamentals and defense. They looked to make dunks and no-look passes instead of hustling for loose balls and setting screens. They were felled by hubrisitic arrogance. Seems like we've been here before, very recently. Two months ago, the U.S. flamed out of the World Cup under a hailstorm of criticism. But strangely enough, the American soccer team was criticized for the exact opposite reasons. The players didn't have enough flair. They were fundamentally sound but lacking in creativity and athleticism. The U.S. team was faceless, artless, and empty. They're "trained monkeys" who are "incapable of having an original or ad-libbed thought on a soccer pitch." Basketball and soccer aren't all that different, except in scoring rates. Both sports prize fast, fluid athletes who can think on their feet. Teamwork usually trumps individuality. So, why the contradictory excuses for America's bad showings in international play? The U.S. basketball team lost because it ran into an extremely hot Greek team in a one-and-done game... The single biggest reason for the loss was the Americans' failure to defend the high pick-and-roll. Greece ran this simple play on almost every possession after the first quarter for layup after layup. The United States' lapses against the pick-and-roll don't have anything to do with the me-first nature of the American player, though. This was a deficiency in scouting-Coach K and his staff should have been better prepared for Greece's offense. But more than anything, team defense depends on reps and familiarity, something this hastily assembled team didn't have. By the time the 2008 Olympics roll around, the U.S. defense won't be a sieve. Now, let's look at the U.S. soccer team. As I wrote in June, the Americans' failings in the World Cup had more to do with our guys failing to challenge themselves in the top European leagues than with the team's supposed deficit in creativity.

Via Scott Freeman's blog, an Australian airport prank: