April 19, 2005 Archives
SU faculty, staff, and students waiting to see who the pope will be
The first thing I heard around me today when the pope was announced today (besides my German friend cheering) was talk about "the conservative guy" being elected. This has led me to publish the following rant:
The Catholic Church had to elect the most conservative pope ever because Catholics today are the most liberal they've ever been! It's counterbalance, people!
Under Pope John Paul II, the "Pope of the People that wouldn't let his people do what they wanted to," less and less people were "being Catholic." Catholics around the world reformed the Catholic Church themselves, even if the Vatican didn't like it.
The fact of the matter is that the pope is a figurehead today. He has no real power outside his institution. About the only thing he can do is keep women from becoming priests and try to prevent homosexuals from from getting married in a Catholic church.
People, even those claiming to be "true Catholics," are still going to have pre-marital sex, abortions, and beef on Fridays, because he can't do anything about it. That's a main reason why Pope John Paul II was so popular in the first place, because he wasn't feared. He was a lovable man who forgave everyone and gave great holiday blessings.
It doesn't matter which pope was elected today. Even if it had been the most "liberal," there wouldn't have been women priests or sanctioned homosexual marriages and abortions by the Catholic Church.
And either a liberal or conservative pope ought to crack down on priests abusing children, something a lot of people, including myself, believe JPII didn't do enough about.
Anyway, in a week or two everything will go back to normal. Rome will shrink back to its normal size, and the next time we'll see the Pope on TV will be around Christmas.
Not much has happened since last November... Or, I'm just lazy to write that much...
Over Christmas Break I just worked 40 hours a week at Target and mostly stayed in Syracuse. I took one week off from Christmas to New Year's to spend with my family down in Vestal.
Over Spring Break I flew over to Vienna and spent 10 days or so there. Vienna is not what it once was, but I still had a pretty good time.
This semester I've only been taking four classes (after dropping one). That hasn't made my life easy though. In fact, I should be studying right now for a damn Politics of Western Europe exam which is a real pain.
Spring is finally here, and today it reached 80°F (27°C) and it hasn't rained in over eleven days. I'm planning on studying in Vienna this summer, which should satisfy my Vienna addiction.
The SU Quad today. The yellow tape was some kind of architecture class's project/protest thing.
Well, after four months this weblog is finally back in action! Let me explain what happened:
Last November I decided to move my site to a new host which offered me a better deal. In the course of one night or so I moved about 95% of my content to the new host. (I still haven't moved AISVIENNA.COM) Problems came up with just about ever aspect of the site that used a database to store data. This includes AIS2002.COM, this weblogs (life and site), my guestbook, my link site, and my "Ask Kai" section (which I'm getting rid of anyway).
So after fixing up a few things like AIS2002.COM, I became lazy and didn't do much here at all. Well I started to get sick of people asking me to fix the site up, so I'm working on it again.
I'm going to combine both weblogs into one and separate them by category. You can filter out what you want to read about using the category selector to the right. I'm also going to make the blog a little more "bloggy" by giving my opinion on current local, national, and international politics. So let's see how long I can keep it going this time!
Note: To comment on my entries you now have to register with TypeKey. This only takes a couple seconds and lets you comment on thousands of blogs out there. I enacted this because the comment boxes were being used for spam over 99.99% (no exaggeration, there are over 20,000 spam entries I'm working on getting rid of right now) of the time.
Oh, and I'm also missing over 200 entries from 2000-2002 and 2003-2004 that I'll have to manually add back.
