Post #300

Only random thoughts are being deployed for this blogging milestone. I'm saving the good stuff for post #1000.

• The Gates Foundation is planning to run through its $60 billion dollars within 50 years of the trustee's deaths. This is presumably to avoid the Gates Foundation becoming a sitting duck for a future "bureaucratic capture" -- wealthy foundations attract the kind of attention from political operators that high-stakes gamblers attract from mafia kingpins. Twentieth century liberals in particular were notorious for targeting the big charitable foundations established with industrial profits such as the Ford Foundation.


• A review of the movie "The Nativity Story" faults it for not making the Virgin Mary more of a contemporary American teenager (author's italics):

  It seems odd that [director] Hardwicke, who coaxed superb performances from both Evan Rachel Wood and Holly Hunter in the emotionally raw coming-of-age story Thirteen, would be content with such a placid, even submissive Mary. As she proved in Whale Rider, [actress] Castle-Hughes has no shortage of spark. If only the movie had tweaked expectations enough to give her Mary a Gethsemane moment, in which she struggled to reconcile the directive of her God with her natural adolescent desire to rebel, to have fun, maybe even to taste the pleasures of the flesh.

  I'm not a Biblical scholar, but I think its safe to say that giving the Virgin Mary the sexual mores of a twenty-first century MTV "fly girl" pretty much directly contradicts the point of the nativity story. Or why can't the Virgin Mary be more like Lindsay Lohan?