The next recipient of America’s highest civilian award, the Congressional Gold Medal: Tibet’s god-king, the Dalai Lama.

Not to be confused with the Congressional Medal of Honor (which is awarded to military personnel only), nomination for the Congressional Gold Medal requires support of 2/3 of the House and at least 67 Senators before a nominee is considered.

Although the first recipients included citizens who participated in the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, Congress broadened the scope of the medal to include actors, authors, entertainers, musicians, pioneers in aeronautics and space, explorers, lifesavers, notables in science and medicine, athletes, humanitarians, public servants, and foreign recipients.

Past recipients include George Washington, John Paul Jones, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Charles Lindbergh, Robert Frost, Robert Kennedy, Rosa Parks and other historical notables.

Now, I don’t mean to disparage the holy man — I’ve enjoyed his writings and have quite a bit of admiration for him as a person. But therein lies the problem: my admiration is based on him as a human being, whereas he and his supporters claim that he is in fact a reincarnation of Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva of compassion.

Therein lies my problem.

Is the award going to the man who was born a Tibetan and became a monk, or is it going to the reincarnated entity — and aren’t the two inseparable?

Interesting news from NASA today about lightning striking the poles on Jupiter:

Images from a NASA probe have shown that lightning does occur at the poles on Jupiter, a phenomenon previously only seen on Earth, a study released Tuesday said.

Lightning strikes had previously been observed at lower latitudes and around the equator on the gas planet but the jagged bolts of electricity had never been observed at either of its two poles, puzzling astronomers.

Maybe it’s just me but the thought of “lightning” + “gas planet” seems a bit alarming, don’t you think? Kind of makes me wonder if Einstein was right when he said God does not play dice with the universe.

Faced with the need to increase its online advertising revenue, the New York Times stopped charging for access to parts of its website.

For two years, the paper has offered a subscription program, TimesSelect, that allowed access to columns and archives. (Access was free for print subscribers.) Only 227,000 felt the NYT was so irreplaceable as to be worth the $49.95 per year fee.

Times execs claim they’d always set their expectations low. Even so, they’d recently realized that the majority of visitors to their online site were arriving there from search engines only to find themselves denied access to search results. Plus — and here’s the truly surprising part — they finally figured out that people arriving via Google, for instance, weren’t going to pay to access an archived article.

Yes, folks, it’s the “DUH!” heard ’round the world.

News keeps coming in about the pit bull who allegedly sodomized a toddler. As I’d previously written, Rhonda at StinkyJournalism.org had sent me additional information which indicated the dog may have been trained to mount humans.

Obviously, such training would point to heinous human criminal involvement and explains why the police had inquired about previous acts of aggression. Investigators contacted the dog’s previous owner, who’d had the dog as a puppy before it was taken in by the boy’s family. The owner said there was no prior history of aggression or even biting.

Although the investigation is ongoing, several questions have been repeatedly raised. Where were the boy’s parents at the time of the attack? How would a dog get a diaper off of a toddler without leaving bite marks? And, most of all, is the dog being accused of sodomy that was actually committed by a human?

Via Rhonda again comes this update which addresses many of those questions:

“We’re still plodding through it,” Lockport Police Detective Capt. Larry Eggert said.

Eggert said nothing incriminating was found in the results of DNA tests that were taken from the dog and from the boy.

“If it says dog DNA for both parties, it’s dog DNA, which is pretty much what we were expecting,” he said.

Women’s and Children’s Hospital of Buffalo will not release any information about the boy’s current condition or if he is still a patient there. He underwent surgery there when he was admitted on July 8, the day of the attack.

The boy’s mother told police he had just removed his own dirty diaper and asked her to change him. She said he went into the living room to get a clean diaper and was alone with the dog, a 2-year-old pit bull named Bear, for a matter of minutes when the attack occurred.

The mother heard the boy scream and walked in to see the dog sodomizing him, police said.

Eggert said at the time the boy suffered “some pretty significant injuries” and was expected to undergo reconstructive surgery.

So, while DNA tests rule out a human as the perpetrator of the sodomy, the test results do not rule out human culpability. And the mother certainly has a plausible explanation for why the child was not wearing a diaper at the time of the attack. She is, incidentally, still demanding that the dog — which remains in custody of the SPCA in Niagra County — be put down.

Many of you have left comments indicating that dogs do not act this way of their own accord. I am not a dog owner, but I’m familiar enough with the concept of the “alpha dog” and notions of “pack mentality” to wonder whether such territorial, instinctive behaviour could account for this kind of an attack.

Share your thoughts.