Just checking on things this morning and...

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I seem to have lost my hotel.  Oh, I am pretty sure I have a room secured.  I just can't remember exactly which hotel it was.  As I bring them up, none of them seems to match what I remember.  I will just have to start making some phone calls.  And hope.  I am sure I put my email address in and asked for confirmation to be sent, but then didn't check on it. I hate when things work like this.  Yeah, I do little things to check on stuff or set them up or such perpetually... Mostly.  Usually I don't run into lost reservations though.  Later.

Found it, it's all good.  Even if I was... asking for the wrong day.  Doh!  Shouldn't get in a panic while still waking, makes for terrible checking.  And, yet, it worked out.  The 22nd, not the 25th.  What was buzzing through my bean.  Never mind.  Now I can get on with things.  Like figuring out when I need to leave, with room in there.

Oh, and on another topic, it seems there might be salvation from mindrot for even the rich and famous.  There is a long path yet to walk, but...  It is amazing what happens when people become fearless and finally actually look, learn, and think instead of feel.  The poverty that is out there is truly horrid.  What it leaves people, human beings, to live in and die in is... breathtakingly wretched.  But giving them anything, save in cases, and temporarily at that, where their lives have been upended through acts out of anyone's control such as with extreme drought, flooding, or other catastrophes, is leading them into further suffering.

While it is difficult to say no, just as with a child and candy, the better for seeming heartlessness is that the child grows to both appreciate correct nutrition, learns to seek what beyond that they might need or want with cocomitted limits to that access, and helps the child understand law.  Take those things away by indulging and the child, man, woman, are ruined.  Eventually they can't help themselves.  It's... why I really prefer to avoid hospitals.  The years I was constantly hospitalized by needs were the worst of years.

Yes, if Bono can come around, and yes I was praying for him, and specifically, then who knows who else might be able to be lead to reason by knowledge, truth, even the Truth it may seem.  They do have to get over their fear of the truth, they have to get over their emotions relating to events, they have to get over their own excesses and the belief that those are normal, then they have to be brave enough to see, and admit, they were wrong.  It's a hell of a haul.  I'll... give him... a point or two for going this far.  Now to see that to fruition.  Where he goes from here is what will matter.  Will he begin advocating for an end to the bad sorts of aid?  Baby steps, I suppose.  I know them well, in many ways.

Of course, he still has a major problem.  He still believes poverty can be ended.  As a Christian he doesn't seem to even know what Christ said, or simply chooses, yet, not to believe.  Poverty, as with war and rumors of war, will haunt the steps of men for all of our days.  Fine, do what we can for our brothers and sisters.  But... don't think you can undo the truth as spoken by God, and directly to us.  Oh, it wasn't that He cursed us with these things, He merely noted our choices lead to this reality.  That choice cannot be undone here, only there and only through Him.  Still... Bono is... coming along about as well as could be expected in the best of circumstances given his... past.  That, my friends, is the power of prayer.

Yea, yea, I'm going.  Oh, and I received a email confirmation, so I shouldn't lose my hotel again.  Later.