St. Patrick

De La Cruz had a poor half-year with the Pirates when they traded for him last year. But he's been one of the Braves' best bats in spring training. His .333 average is the third-best of any Braves batter who's played in 10 or more games. He has the second-most doubles, three RBI, and has only struck out twice. He may start in right field for them.

Anti-Bart.

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Why, exactly, is Russia's permission to deploy French or English troops in Ukraine necessary?

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The NIH could not get its act together during Covid to make fast grants with sufficient rapidity during a time of crisis. They performed much worse than did say the NSF. For example:

---A while back the NIH set up a program to make riskier grants. The program did not in fact make riskier grants.

---The NIH killed the idea of an independent DARPA-like biomedical research agency, fearing it would limit the size and influence of the NIH itself.

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St. Patrick

St. Patrick was born in the 5th century into a Romanized British family, kidnapped by Irish raiders and held as a herdsman for six years, and then escaped back to England, only to return as a Christian missionary to Ireland.

He is credited with bringing Christianity to Ireland and was probably responsible for much of the Christianization of the Picts and Anglo-Saxons. He is known only from two short works, the Confessio, his spiritual autobiography, and his Letter to Coroticus, a denunciation of British mistreatment of Irish Christians. The writings are apparently crude, but heartfelt.
D.A. Binchy, the most austerely critical of Patrician (i.e., of Patrick) scholars, writes, “The moral and spiritual greatness of the man shines through every stumbling sentence of his ‘rustic’ Latin.”

There is a lot of mythology about him; these are my two favorites.

      When he returned to Ireland he sought out the man who enslaved him, to forgive him and to convert him. The man was so upset by Patrick's spirituality and forgiveness that he was unable to forgive himself, so he went into his house and took his own life in despair.

      During one of his conversions, he had a war chief before him. Patrick held a long, sharp staff that he flourished during the ceremony and occasionally drove its point into the ground. Making a point, as it were. In one of these moments, Patrick inadvertently drove the staff's point through the war chief's foot. The man remained silent and did not move or change his expression. At the end of the ritual, someone asked the war chief why he didn't cry out or object to the wound. 

"I thought it was part of the ceremony," he said