MOOREWATCH – Reinventing Frankenstein – COMMENTS
That fat lying slob Moore, gets his nonsense taken apart and handed him. Worth a read.
Merry Christmas.
Yeah, I know, it’s not politically popular, and will likely create some hate mail from people who take offense at my saying anything positive about Jesus Christ. So be it; I’ve never been concerned about that anyway. I think the best thing I can do is repost a BIT I did a couple years ago. It’s interesting, perhaps to look on some of those comments near 9/11 comments in retrospect. And the ideas passed on are worthwhile every year, I think.
12-25-01 10:20Hrs–Rochester, NY—
Another Christmas has come.
This one is filled with all the wonder and all of the joy that their predecessors have brought, along with some added sadness. As I sat and watched our two kids open their gifts from Santa this year, over the rim of my morning tea, a focusing thought struck me. Is it just me or do our lives get sadder every year? I just had to write a column…
No, don’t worry. I’ve not taken leave of my senses… I am not being overly morose here, nor am I wallowing in self- pity. There is a positive point, here, trust me.
But consider; as we get older, we become more aware of the world around us, and how hard it can be. Small concerns are our focus when we are as young as my two are. My younger boy’s biggest concern is, will he get to play with his trains today, and watching a favorite cartoon. The older boy’s big thing these days is watching the real trains when we get the chance to go out and see them together. (I suspect that the ‘together’ part is the most important.)
As we grow up, our focus changes, of necessity. It’s a hard world out there, and being adults we’ve come to understand this, in a way of understanding that only long exposure and experience can bring.
Each new hurt leaves it’s own scar on our souls. We see, this year, the illusions of peace disappearing in the Middle East, and we’ve seen the war being brought to us here in the US. There’s nothing like the specter of 5000 people dying on national television to remind us we’re not in control.
Seems every year we have more worries and concerns. We worry about out health, and those concerns increase with advancing age. We worry about our jobs, about our investments, our savings, about the future in general. Retirement is a concern. Will we have enough? We worry about the future our kids will have and the normal growing up problems, but we also worry about the future that we’ve left our kids. What kind of a world have we left them? We see loved ones die. We’ve seen marriages we thought would pass the test of time, pass away, instead. Things we had hoped would come to pass, didn’t, and those we’d not dreamed, in our wildest nightmares would happen, did. The list of these reverses, these scars, gets longer as the years progress, and it starts eventually, to break down the positive outlook in us all…. Each according to their ability to resist.
And that, I thought, over this morning’s Earl Grey, is why Christmas holds a special place in our hearts, and our traditions. The obvious spiritual considerations aside for the moment, it is a time of renewal of our fragile human spirit. All of the hurts, small and large, become less pronounced, and fade under the soft glow of the lights, the candles the fireplace, and the smile of the children.
It is the children, in fact, that do us the most healing. Our long experience has hardened us to the realities of the world around us, and perhaps jaded our point of view.
Christmas though, comes along and gives us, individually and collectively, the chance of looking at the world though the wonder-filled eyes of a child once again. Becoming childlike, ourselves, in the process, and becoming healed and renewed.
Hmmm. Little Children, eh? (Sound of turning pages)
“And whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me.”
“Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
“I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure.”
Healing, indeed!
A blessed Christmas to each of you.
Security Concerns Force Flight Cancellations
Six trips from Paris to Los Angeles have apparently been canned based on security concerns. The U.S. gov’t apparently has new inforamtion that Al Qaeda has somehow infiltrated Air France flight.
France.
Whodathunkit?
Yahoo! News – Vancouver facing worst outbreak of syphilis in the developed world
I doubt I have to add anything here.
Lookie what I found.
I was getting rather sick of the nonsense I’ve been seeing on Usenet and on DU, which claim there’s no connection between the downfall of Saddam, and the Libians now being quiet and meek as mice. what I found was a story dated April 9th in the Telegraph.
Telegraph | News | UN should fight for rights, says Berlusconi
In the story, we find:
“A spokesman for Mr Berlusconi said the prime minister had been telephoned recently by Col Gaddafi of Libya, who said: ‘I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid.'”
Push this one to a liberal near you.
Quad-City Times Newspaper Online – the Quad-Cities Home Page
Says the article:
“For 12 weeks, editorial page readers have learned a little bit about the human side of our presidential caucus candidates.
Our Caucus Q&A each Sunday defines each candidate in terms beyond position statements. They have divulged childhood experiences and influential teachers. In today’s installment, the candidates named their favorite comedy film.
Last Sunday, Howard Dean offered an unusually revealing answer.
The candidates were asked to complete this sentence: My closest living relative in the armed services is…?
.
Dean’s reply: “…my brother is a POW/MIA in Laos, but is almost certainly dead.”
Dean’s truthful answer provided an inaccurate response. His brother was never a member of the armed services.”
So, Dean lies.
But it gets better. This is a lie he’s already been called on in this space…. I’ve already done this one.
Which would mean after he’d been caught at it, he went right back to it. Oh, yeah, I want this guy to be president. Sure.
WFTV.com – News – Florida Homeowners Group Tells Woman To Remove Virgin Mary
Anyone who wants evidence that there is a war against religion out there, need look no further…. unless they look here. Terry Jeffrey says:
“The ACLU is targeting the voluntary lunchtime prayer that has been a tradition at the Naval Academy since its founding.”
Ananova – William Shatner to release new album
I’m an unabashed Trek fan, but this makes me want to re-examine the virtues of instant dieting. (Think about it).
That he’d try this again, after last time’s reviews of that Beatles cover he did back in ’68, makes me wonder about his sanity. (It was in a word, dreck.)
And Brad Paisley, I can understand; he’s owed Bill one for “Celebrity’ for some months now. (I wonder if Paisley will be a reviewer, as Shattner was of his work…)
But Joe Jackson? Henry Rollins?
(Shrug) I guess there are some things we’re not meant to undertand.
Yahoo! News – U.S. Probes How Cow Contracted Disease
Not sure what to make out of this, except to wonder openly if this is a leftover from our neighbors to the north, which isn’t all that far from where this one cow lived. Not placing blame, here, but it does seem to be a logical question… where else is it to have come from, after all?
The subject of homosexual “marriage” has come up again in blogdom… this time at Dan Drezner’s place. Dan has it right, for the most part in that the constitution won’t ban it, nor at this point will an amendment pass to deal with it. Discussion at:
danieldrezner.com :: Daniel W. Drezner :: Why the Constitution will not ban gay marriage
As you’ll see, I have my concerns about the amendment scenario for reasons that won’t be quite obvious, unless you’re a stident of constitutional history. As I point up in Drezner’s site:
“A prohibition on homosexual unions wasn’t written into the constitution because such things were assumed, and therefore never legally defined.
Proof of these assumptions is easy enough to find.
It is interesting for example, that Jefferson, (arguably the biggest social liberal of the lot) thought homosexual acts to be worthy of hanging… (I commend Fawn Brodie’s Jefferson to your reading list) and yet he never indicated anything of the sort in his … our… documents.
Clearly, there was some assumptions made on the part of the founders in this area…. cultural assumptions.
And here, we walk a legal fine line, I fear.
Government, you see, does not operate inside a cultural vaccum. Rather, it exists inside a cultural context it must not run afoul of, lest it become irrelevant to the people it’s supposed to be governing. Yet, while law and government is a more exact science, culture is less so. And so, codification of the culture is problematic at best.
Given this, Jefferson, and the rest of the founders apparently took the attitude that their best tack would be to write laws and a framework that would at least not run afoul of the existing culture, without specifying without attempting to codify the boundires of that culture.
Dan, I think, is right insofar as such an amendment not passing, because it, unlike the remainder of the constitution, it attempts to define the social boundries of the culture it’s charged with governing.
But I wonder what it is then, that the culture has to protect itself, in the end, if not government.”
This is, it seems to me, the legal vs the cultural. And clearly the founders were making chocies based on cultural assumptions. This is today resulting in questions such as Holman W. Jenkins Jr, in the WSJ asks
“If marriage is a mere “legal” right, who can’t get married? If any two people have the right to the legal benefits of marriage, why not three people? Why not two brothers? Why not a man and his father?
It’s hard to see on what basis marriage could logically be denied to anybody. Right now, the state doesn’t ask if a man and woman are heterosexually inclined, if they love each other, if they intend to have children. Marriage largely regulates itself, with the exception being government efforts to prevent marriages intended solely to obtain a green card. But in the world ordained by the Massachusetts supreme court, wouldn’t the state be obliged to make sure two women who want to get married are really lesbians and not just two women trying to acquire the legal advantages of marriage? How else to stop marriage from becoming a right available to any group of people who simply want to organize their affairs as “married” persons?
Right now, the law makes no formal presumption about the sexual orientation of people getting married, just their gender: They have to be of opposite sexes. Yet that small stipulation seems to have succeeded, for the most part, in keeping marriage from becoming a mere contractual convenience. “
I’ve already written at some length about all of this, incidental to the Canadian SC ruling last June.
The problem is a bit more basic, even than a religious question in our increasingly secular society. At it’s root, this is a matter of which will triumph… law and government, or the culture that created said law and said government. Like it or not, the values being railed against by those seeking to install this travisty, are not simply religious values. They are also deep in the roots of our culture. The implications are simple enough to see, then…
In his write-up this week,The Democrats’ Dean dilemma: Bob Novak writes:
“The Dean dilemma was spelled out to me by a sage Democratic practitioner whose views I have sought since 1968. He has felt for months that the former Vermont governor faces horrendous defeat against President Bush. Last week, this party loyalist said he felt Dean will be nominated unless an act of intervention stops him. He added that he is sure Dean can be stopped but at the cost of unacceptable carnage. Implicitly and reluctantly, therefore, he is swallowing Dean.”
And therefore, he’s also knowingly swallowing defeat supposedly to save the party. One question, guys…. Why?
“CHESAPEAKE, Va. (AP) – The jury in the Washington sniper case Tuesday spared Lee Boyd Malvo from the fate awaiting his mentor John Allen Muhammad – the death penalty – after his lawyers portrayed him as an impressionable boy who had fallen under Muhammad’s murderous spell.
Malvo, 18, will be instead be locked away for the rest of his life.”
A classic overstatement. The fact of the matter is, several other states will want a crack at this guy.
Yahoo! News – GDP Roars Ahead at 8.2 Percent in Q3:
“WASHINGTON – The U.S. economy, propelled by tax cuts and low interest rates, roared ahead at an 8.2 percent annual rate in the third quarter, the best showing in nearly 20 years, while Americans’ incomes and spending both showed healthy gains in November. “
The Democrats have one less weapon; they can’t claim the economy isn’t doing well.
Yahoo! News – Ralph Nader Rules Out Green Party Run
Nader, who garnered nearly 3 percent of the national vote in the last presidential election, has not ruled out running for president as an independent and plans to make a decision by January.
And that says it all.
He’ll run as an independant, splitting the left even further.
The mind boggles…When the Greens are too far left even for Nader…..
