Churchill Banished--Because Obama Doesn't Know History?

It says here that the White House bust of Winston Churchill was unceremonially returned to the British Embassy by the incoming Obama administration.

This is an ugly gesture.

Speculation is that the bust was returned (and not merely stowed) because Obama's grandfather was "tortured" as a Mau-Mau activist by Churchill during his second prime ministership.

Unfortunately, this is an historical impossibility: Obama's grandfather was detained two years before Churchill returned to being prime minister of Great Britain.

Furthermore, the source of this information appears to Obama's Kenyan grannie: the same lady who says that Obama was born in Kenya, much to the detriment of his claims of being a "natural born citizen". Not exactly a reliable source, I assume.*

Regardless of all of this: couldn't the bust simply have been moved somewhere quiet in the White House? Sending it back to the British is a deliberate in-your-face. And an unnecessary one, to boot. One that we may one day regret.



*I don't think Obama was born in Kenya. I think that all the charges against him on this point are total BS, and those making them are idiots. But if -- IF -- the allegations of his Kenyan birth turn out to be true, IMPEACH! Election fraud is a felony.

thinskinnedfootballs.com

Geez.

LGF posts about a pro-Islamic ad campaign in San Francisco.

Ace of Spades points out that it's the Islamics' right to run these ads whether LGF likes it or not.

Charles Johnson, Squire of Gothos, whines about this mild bit of criticism.

Geez o pete. Can this guy be any more thin skinned?

Have you read a "Good Book" lately?

[Executive Summary: An intelligent Bible reader of Jewish descent bangs his head against the reality that the Old Testament is one exceedingly grim read.]

There is an old joke from a few years ago, entitled A Short Course on Comparive Religions, which holds that "All religions are variations on the phrase 'shit happens': Hinduism says, 'shit happens over and over again.' Islam says, 'shit happens, God willing.' Zen Buddhists ask, "What is the sound of one shit happening?" Catholicism says, 'If shit happens God is punishing me.' John Calvin says, 'Shit is predestined to happen.' The Jews ask, 'Why does all this shit happen to us?'" And so on.

David Plotz, a conservative Jewish writer for Slate, was educated in a shul as a child, then in an Evangelical Christian university in his youth. He regarded himself fairly well educated as regards the Bible. But he wanted to reexamine the problem, by reading the world's leading book concerning why, er, things happen. A couple of years ago, he began a blogger's journey of a lifetime: urged to reread the entire Bible as a whole from one end to the other, he has done so--and blogged the experience here. He has also turned that blog into Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible.

I have not read the book itself yet (it was only just released), nor even his blog. However, he made certain comments on his experience in a summary that was posted yesterday on Slate.

Here's the long and the short of it: Plotz, a reasonably biblically literate lay person of Jewish background but no outstanding religious belief, has made a major discovery in reading the Bible: the origin of many of our political terms (shibboleth, burning bush, the influence that Amos had on M.L. King's I Have a Dream speech, inter alia). He urges everyone, faithful or not, to read the whole thing all the way through, if nothing else, to become reasonably culturally literate, as our political speech is drawn from the images of the Good Book.

However, he reads the Old Testament only. He chooses to foreclose any investigation into the New Testament by saying:

If I want to find the grace and forgiveness and wonder, I have to read and believe in the story of Jesus Christ, which explains and redeems all. But that doesn't work for me. I'm a Jew. I don't, and can't, believe that Christ died for my sins. And even if he did, I still don't think that would wash away God's crimes in the Old Testament.

In other words, he makes a double handwaive: "Sorry, I'm Jewish," and "God's crimes."

Plotz is clearly an intelligent and well meaning man, and he writes gracefully. But he invokes his Jewish heritage as a permanent and impermiable barrier to his investigation into the second half (yes) of the Bible. He cuts off any consideration of that which makes the Bible not only tolerable, but meaningful.

I enter into this discussion of the Divide with caution, for many reasons. I am a philo-Semitic reluctant Roman Catholic of Irish derivation; my admiration for Judaism is profound but not inherited, as far as I know. Yet it is sad to me that one's Judaic inheritance is supposed to render the New Testament entirely radioactive and beyond, alas, "the pale"; a Christian can wrestle with the Old Testament, but a Jew can't wrestle with the New; indeed, won't even read it.

The ancient and bitter Divide between Christianity and Judaism can get ugly at times. I remember with crystal clarity the shock I got in my freshman year of college when two friends of mine who were then dating--he a Jewish-descended atheist and she a Jewish-descended Christian--got into a nasty argument about religion. She tried to quote the New Testament in support of one of her points, and he spat in reply: "Don't you know that that you are dead?" Needless to say this relationship did not continue for long.

I also remember a second discussion, many years later, with another friend, raised Catholic but who converted to Judaism, who opined that any Jew who converts to Christianity is like another individual has been gassed by Hitler.

(Of course, given Christianity's often painful history--and given the endless numbers of anti-Semites and anti-Jewish atrocities that have polluted Christianity through history--this does not surprise. Alas.)

And yet, painful as it is, this wall of separation between the two faiths is necessary. Judaism stands always under a threat of being absorbed, in this day and age, by the Christianity that surrounds it in most of the world. To maintain and protect itself from its bumptious and sometimes savage younger brother, it is plain that a rough wall must exist.

Furthermore, Christianity itself supports that wall, in a way. (And no, not for its historical occasional relegation of Jews to ghettoes or worse.) Christianity's own scriptures hold that the Jews will continue to exist until the Second Coming, if such there is. God Himself has told us that there cannot be, there will not be, any permanent and total conversion of the Jewish people as a whole until the End of Time, and that they still have a major role to play in His world. (Whether under the New Covenant, the Old Covenant is still in force for the Jews, I leave as a question for theological experts; I myself am not going to go there.)

So: one cannot truly argue with the need for the Divide, alas.

But this is book is not just about the Divide. The key to his true difficulty with the Bible in his phrase "I still don't think that would wash away God's crimes"--an expression that he does, as C.S. Lewis warns us not to: to put "God in the Dock." God, to him, is a committer of "crimes", One who leaves him "heartbroken"--

You notice that I haven't said anything about belief. I began the Bible as a hopeful, but indifferent, agnostic. I wished for a God, but I didn't really care. I leave the Bible as a hopeless and angry agnostic. I'm brokenhearted about God. After reading about the genocides, the plagues, the murders, the mass enslavements, the ruthless vengeance for minor sins (or none at all), and all that smiting—every bit of it directly performed, authorized, or approved by God—I can only conclude that the God of the Hebrew Bible, if He existed, was awful, cruel, and capricious. He gives us moments of beauty—such sublime beauty and grace!—but taken as a whole, He is no God I want to obey and no God I can love.

This is not a particularly original critique--I first encountered the same thing in Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, published 1961--in the section where Jubal Harshaw (Heinlein's Mary Sue), in the middle of a rant against religion in general and Christianity in particular, similarly critiques the Old Testament. He, Heinlein ("Harshaw"), discusses the story where Lot, who, attempting to protect angelic messengers of God from being anally raped by a mob in Sodom, offers his own daughters to be raped in their stead:

But that's what he [Lot] promised -- his virgin daughters, young and tender and scared -- urged this gang to rape them... if only they would leave him in peace! The Bible cites this scum as a 'righteous' man.

(Note: Heinlein very conveniently leaves out the detail that Lot is protecting an Angel of God from mob defilement; ol' RAH is notorious for such.)

Or the story of Elisha and the two bears:

Consider Elisha. Elisha was so all-fired holy that touching his bones restored a dead man to life. He was a bald-headed old coot, like myself. One day children made fun of his baldness, just as you girls do. So God sends bears to tear forty-two children into bloody bits. That's what it says -- second chapter of Second Kings.

This brings us to the question of the odyssey of Theodicy: the question of God's goodness. The God of the Old Testament, taken on its face, fails that test outright. He (to quote Stephen King's The Stand) "ain't no nice guy." Not only is this God not a tame Lion, He's a savage man-eater.

That's really the sad truth: the Old Testament is an ugly, ugly story. Without a Messiah-Christ, or the Mosiach-He-Who-Is-To-Come (take your pick), to make sense of it, it's as grim a book of fairy tales as you could ask.

If there was no redemption, no Resurrection, then we find ourselves as did Job, sitting by a cold fire in the ashes of his burned out farm, wondering "why me, Lord?" (And it's no comfort to remember what He said to Job in reply: "None of your business!")

It is in the light of this that Mr. Plotz raises a most intelligent point, and which shows that he is not without a certain insight into what he has just read.

As I read the book, I realized that the Bible's greatest heroes—or, at least, my greatest heroes—are not those who are most faithful, but those who are most contentious and doubtful: Moses negotiating with God at the burning bush, Gideon
demanding divine proof before going to war, Job questioning God's own justice, Abraham demanding that God be merciful to the innocent of Sodom. They challenge God for his capriciousness, and demand justice, order, and morality, even when God refuses to provide them. Reading the Bible has given me a chance to start an argument with God about the most important questions there are, an argument that can last a lifetime.

Indeed: in the absence of the Christian belief in redemption by the Blood of His Son, we are only left with one option: to stare God in the eye and ask, "SAY WHAT"? (Or to close the circle: "Why does all this shit happen to us?")

And that is the essence of the Jewish faith: to wrestle with God. The Jews remain the children of Israel, i.e., of He-who-Wrestled-With-The-Angel. It is this willingness to confront Him that makes me say, as I stated in an earlier post: "show me the bones of Christ and five minutes later I would convert to orthodox Judaism."

The Bible tells us that Jacob overcame the angel. Here is a prayer that Mr. Plotz, by all appearances a righteous man, does the same.

Actually, let me amend that: let us all wrestle Him and win.

Whut we hayve hyeah....

....is a failyuh to excommunicate.

The nomination of Gov. Sebelius to HHS is a thumb in the eye of every Catholic believer in the country.

The answer to the Sebelius nomination is simple: she should be very publicly told to renounce her support for abortion or be very publicly excommunicated by the Holy, Roman, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Without delay and without apologies.

To openly maintain and advocate legal abortion is ipso facto an act of desecration of the Faith, and should be accordingly noted and acted upon by our bishops. (And the first person who says the word "inopportune" gets to go stand in the corner.)

Furthermore, the Obama reversal on protection of conscience is quite simply evil.

As for Kmiec, former dean of my old law school, who is not a public official, he simply needs to realize he has sold his inheritance for a pot of message, and otherwise be forever disregarded. He's 30 years out of date, and 30 years out of season. Forget him.

“There is no God, and I hate him.”

A wise insight: many who reject the existence of God do so because they have a fly problem: they can't keep theirs closed.

Thank you, Transsylvania Phoenix...

For our 'official' First Shout-out.

In honor whereof we have activated Comments.

littlegreenstfutballs.com

Charles Johnson,

Squire of Gothos:

How Little Green Footballs

Nuked the Fridge

[Executive Summary: LGF LIZARDS BEWARE! CHARLES JOHNSON CAN, AND HAS, BETRAYED THE PRIVACY OF HIS READERS AND POSTERS AND WILL SACRIFICE YOUR TRUST TO MAKE A TRIVIAL POINT. HE DID IT TO ME; HE CAN DO IT TO YOU.]

Nuke the Fridge: A colloquialism used to delineate the precise moment at which a cinematic franchise has crossed over from remote plausibility to self parodying absurdity [...compare "jump the shark"]. From an incident in the movie Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

- http://www.urbandictionary.com/

In the "mock rockumentary" movie "This Is Spinal Tap", there is a running gag about the band's drummer(s)... apparently, the band is incapable of keeping its drummers alive for more than one album at a time, as they keep dying in bizarre and unexpected ways. Two of them spontaneously combust. Another drowns, not in his own vomit, but in somebody else's.

This is the story of a jazz guitarist who, without ever playing for Spinal Tap, very deliberately nuked the fridge, spontaneously combusted, and drowned in vomit very much of his own making. His name is Charles Johnson, and his story is a cautionary tale for those of us who think that blogging is the Wave of the Future.

A long time ago in a left coast far, far away, there was a guy who played the guitar. He was pretty good at it, most ways, but never got famous; apparently, either he never tore up any hotel rooms nor did he manage to die spectacularly in the line of duty. (This is, indeed, a good thing.) However, at the end of his career, finding that he was not ever going to become the next Uncle Frank, he decided he needed another career if he was ever going to see retirement.

So Charles Johnson decided to become a computer programmer. As it developed, a rather good one. Not perhaps great, not spectacular, but good and workable; he apparently made a decent living at it.

At one point or another, he decided to start a blog as a sort of in-house project at his computer company. He called it, for irrelevant reasons that remain obscure, Little Green Footballs. Originally it was a blog about his rock career and his spectacularly uninteresting hobby of long-distance bicycle riding. It was primarily useful at the start as a source of model coding of various Web-related bells and whistles; its only major flaw was that its creeping featuritis made it, then and now, somewhat of a slog to download.

Then, 9/11 happened, which rocked our world in many spectacular ways.

Johnson started blogging on The Global War on Terror (yes, we used to call it that, before its primary purpose got changed and it was renamed The Local War on Sarah Palin). Johnson then became one of the leaders among those known as "Warbloggers" - i.e., individuals particularly interested in the activities of Radical Islam worldwide, as well as activities related to the war against Iraq. He became, reluctantly, a bulwark of the Bush administration for a number of years.

And he developed a following.

Johnson's posts are not terribly analytical; he often just makes snarky comments about news stories he doesn't like. However, he has always had a sharp eye for news stories that bury the lede or otherwise hide, for ideological purposes, the true "news" within their verbiage. Between his eye for news and his whiz-bang website, he has acquired a number of readers, and with readers come suggested links, and with the links come more stories, etc. A snowball effect, as it were.

In 2004, LGF made the first of its major coups: The Dan Rather Scandal. I'll quote Johnson's Wikipedia entry on the subject:

Johnson, and other conservative bloggers, gained attention during the 2004 U.S. presidential election for their role in exposing as forgeries several memos purporting to document irregularities in George W. Bush's National Guard service record. (See Killian documents and Killian documents authenticity issues.) CBS news anchor Dan Rather presented the memos as authentic in a Sept. 8, 2004 report on 60 Minutes Wednesday, two months before the vote. Days after the broadcast, Johnson showed the documents, supposedly typewritten in 1973, could have been created easily on a modern computer using Microsoft Word.

In 2006, during the Israeli war against the terrorist group Hizbollah, he got a second notch on his ideological gun: the Reuters "fauxtography" scandal, wherein he found that a Reuters photographer had submitted photographs that had been deliberately altered, via Photoshop, to give the appearance of Israeli air-war atrocities against Lebanon.

These two coups were to Mr. Johnson's enormous credit. It was long past time that the serial liar Dan Rather be consigned to the ashheap of history. Furthermore, the dangers presented by digitally counterfeit news photographs needed a very public airing. His eagle eye brought that to public attention and for that he should receive full credit.

But then.... Charles Johnson found his god.

No, it wudn't Jesus. It wasn't the Buddha either. It certainly wasn't Mohammad. Or even the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

He found Charles Darwin.

Now, most intelligent people who are Christian believers have no trouble accepting the idea of evolution as the source of the origin of species, and the idea that we live in an old universe (13 to 17 billion years) is not threatening in the least to our religious faith.

However, while there is a certain attraction among religious believers in an old universe (hey, I think it's cool that God took 17 billion years to cook me out of His Primordial Soup), fanatical belief in evolution as something to be held onto as an end of itself is a touchstone among many who actively hate and fear traditional religious belief-in particular, Christianity.

It is, indeed, a fundamentalist secularism that has taken belief in Darwin and raised it as an item of religious devotion. To evolutionary fundamentalists, the anointed Darwin is not to be dissed; evolution has replaced transubstantiation as the Mystical End-All of the mystery of life. The Trinity is replaced by the trilobite; the Crucifix by the Cretaceous; the Virgin Birth by parthogenesis.

And this is where Charles (Johnson, not Darwin) began to fall off the edge of the plate.

He started posting with greater and greater focus on something he fears and hates with a passion: the so-called "Intelligent Design" movement, whereby certain Christian Protestant fundamentalists have attempted to drive their beliefs in a Young Earth into the science classroom.

This is of course an absurd movement. There is no more such a thing as "Christian views on evolution"any more than than there are Christian views on algebra. Two plus two equals four is true regardless of whether Christ rose from the grave. So it is with evolution.

A Catholic can say it: Intelligent Design is nothing more than an attempt by certain Protestant fundamentalists to deny the undeniable-that the Bible is, in fact, not literally true in every line. It is an attempt to preserve what Catholics correctly term a 'heresy.' I.e., it ain't so.

The problem was that Charles wanted to go beyond mere opposition to Intelligent Design. He doesn't simply attach truth to the idea of evolution; he has come to view any expression of religious belief as a threat to Science Itself and therefore anathema. Yes, anathema, a Catholic word: for the truth of it is that Charles Johnson is a Roman Catholic, who has for now turned from the faith: his Wikipedia entry states that he "now considers himself an agnostic." (Although there is no sign of his agnosticism where Darwin is concerned.)

It is in the light of this religious fundamentalism, this Darwin-worship, that Johnson began the fridge-nuking process, when he began to equate every single theist, without exception, as an "I.D.-er" regardless of whether they advocated I.D. or not. Furthermore, he has a nasty habit of seeing mail that he hates and thinking that that is the definition of "hate mail." Finally is his well-known fondness of banning anybody, anybody, who disagrees with him on any subject.

I am sure he has been doing this for a long time, but on February 10, 2009, on a thread concerning Mike Huckabee's fantasies about updating the Constitution, I first noticed this as regards myself--Charles became openly hostile toward me for posting, not in support of Huckabee as such, but in support of those who might wish to change the Constitution without actually succeeding in doing so. (The Abolitionists were among these in the 1850s--and were as universally reviled in their day as political Christians are in ours.)

It was at this point Charles began to become hostile toward me, an individual whom he had previously not even noticed, accusing me of being an anti-evolutionist and a theocrat. (I won't bore you with a full recount of the events involved; if you're really interested you can read them yourself.)

A couple days later, after seeing Charles continued vitriol, I transmitted to him a simple "I Resign" post, saying words to the effect that I was sorry I could not continue to "chant in unison with the rest of his choir."

Charles took that rather amiss.

The next day, Charles continued to crap all over Christianity and Christian Republicans, making it clear that he viewed us as nuts or worse. So I sent him an Email where I took him to task.

That got me THIS expression of his very personal attention. I'm reposting it below:

===================================


We Got Mail!

Opinion Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 9:27:16 am PST

Sure enough, after my post yesterday on respecting the Constitution and opposing theocracy, the hate mail started pouring in, from self-labeled "Christians." There are four of them this morning, but I'll just post this one because the others are banal and uninteresting. (The contact form has an explicit notice: "Messages may be published in our weblog, unless you request otherwise.")

The title of this one was "not a hate mail...", which seems a bit inaccurate.

....but I respectfully take a parting dissent to your claim that Christian activism that "desires" to change the Constitution is "not conservative and unamerican."

Sir, wishing to change the Constitution is NOT unAmerican.... if you accept that yours is a minority view and not able to pass. Taking up arms when you can't get your way? THAT is "unAmerican."

By labeling all Christians who refuse to shut up and simply "pray, pay and obey" secularists like you as un-American, you have just consigned a good 1/3 of the population to un-personhood.... and 2/3 of the GOP to non-participation in a representative government whose [taxes] they must still pay.

No sir. We're here, we're Christian. Get used to us. Otherwise, get used to outer darkness yourselves. The GOP CANNOT WIN WITHOUT US.

When the jackboots of the left come for YOU, who will you count on for support? You can't shit on our altars and then ask for our help. It doesn't work that way.

Goodbye.

Richard L. Kent, Esq.

Good grief. What do you even say to something like that? ((snip))*

===================================

*Yes I know that there is more; I'll address that in a later post.

Well, a little while later, Charles clearly has no trouble coming up with "what to say": in the comments below on that thread he deliberately identified me and my pseud, he outs me, as being the individual posting under a pseud on his blog-Arkay-and, when other individuals identified me and posted my professional blog site (http://www.richardlkentesq.com/). The obvious point was to urge each other to contact my "employer" with denunciations so as to try to get me to lose my job. Whether Charles did this or not is immaterial; he let the posts remain. The threat was obvious.

Fortunately for me, I'm self employed, so nothing you can say to my boss could possibly damage me.

But that is not the point.

I have posted elsewhere and I'll repeat it now:

Readers and posters on LGF should now be on notice that CHARLES JOHNSON CAN AND IS WILLING TO BETRAY THE PRIVACY OF HIS READERS AND POSTERS AND WILL SACRIFICE YOUR TRUST TO MAKE A TRIVIAL POINT.

What is most amazing about this is that this is against Charles's own best interest. Now people will be afraid to speak their mind, lest six months from now they cross him and he "outs" them. This is the death knell for his blog once people understand it clearly.

Next, it should be noted that I wasn't the only person he squashed that day: another individual, known only to me by the name Transylvanian Phoenix, dared to agree with me. Charles dredged up an old post that he, Charles, claimed that the Phoenix had posted a year earlier. Charles claimed that Phoenix wanted to round up and deport all Muslims.

A nasty cat fight ensued: Did Phoenix want to round up all Muslims and deport them? Or was Charles as dishonest as he was nasty and willing to change peoples' posts for trivial purposes?

Beats me. Your guess is as good as mine. I can't judge either way, based on what I know about Charles.

However, based on his behavior, Charles' problem is plainly that the thought that Christianity may actually be truth terrifies him. IMHO, something (or Someone) is tickling his sense of mortality and dread at the Creator he has abandoned and he's very touchy right now. Understandable; many have precisely that difficulty at his stage in life. ("Men Wobberts' age are offen unstaaable, pwohn to weeekness." - Edna Mode.)

But it doesn't excuse his recent bad judgment, bad temper... or the fact that he's simply acting like Trelane, the Squire of Gothos, when someone more adult threatens to take away a toy of his.

This is not a rant about "how I got banned from LGF"--who cares about that? (And for the record: I wasn't banned; I quit.) This is more important than that: it is about the promise to keep anonymity and its breach. If you can't trust Charles, why would you dare post on his blog?

I also would like to add that I am not the only one who noticed. The respected "Atlas Shrugs" blog noted that Charles' habit of banning those unwilling to join the LGF Claque has reached the point that he has become "officially" "a joke." Alas.

And how does Charles deal with this lese-majeste? By accusing Atlas Shrugs of harboring "neo-Nazi agitprop". He cites extremist comments made by Atlas Shrugs as signs that Atlas Shrugs is extremist. Of course, posters of nastiness on HIS site are not his fault!

Post to LGF at your own risk! Remember: there is no god but Darwin and Charles Johnson is his prophet!

I address this last to Charles:

Dear Mr. Johnson:

You have read the above indictment. Mr. Johnson, you are now on notice: when you try to destroy the careers of people who do not agree with you, you cross the line into an internet menace. Responsible people will no longer trust you and you will no longer get either quality opinions posted to your site or, ultimately, good leads. They will go elsewhere, where the poster need not fear betrayal at the hands of a vengeful godoid with a keyboard.

But. You now have a chance to redeem yourself. You can admit you were wrong to out me by name and promise not to do it again in the future.

If you so fear disagreement, I am sure that you can simply script a program. It would take a small number of monkeys on keyboards about five minutes to create a script that generates comments, by randomly quoting one of your snarky posts, and then follows it with some variation of "You are most certainly right, Charles!" Just like your Uncle Frank Sez generator. It would read almost like a Platonic dialogue, with you as Socrates.

I'm sure an internet god you could do it without difficulty. And think of all the web editing it would save you in the future.

Unashamedly,

Richard L. Kent, Esq.

P.S. Why am I even blogging this? Who cares? Answer: As you see, Charles has a habit of digging up people's old posts (or worse!) when they attack him or even disagree with him. I'm simply making a record in case I ever come up on his radar again.

UPDATE MAY 16, 2009

IT TURNS OUT THAT CHARLES JOHNSON HAS ANNOUNCED HE WILL OUT EVERYBODY WHO CROSSES HIM.

READ THE DETAILS HERE:

http://infinitemonkeyatthekeyboard.blogspot.com/2009/05/squire-of-gothos-threatens-his-own.html

Siegfried and Roy Do One Last Act.....

....for charity: a new medical institute for treating brain injuries like Roy suffered.

Siegfried, Roy, and the tiger that almost killed the latter appeared together on stage.

There is no joke here. I was going to... but then reconsidered. This is actually pretty cool of them.

Every great performer deserves the chance for a final bow. Methinx they've earned it.

And now he has finally learned....

....the rest of the story.

God bless and keep you, Paul Harvey. G'day.

Fridge Pic #003: "Owl's Well...."

An orphan owl chick cuddles with a stuffed plushy toy owl given it by its caretaker.

Best comment from FreeRepublic: "I know the feeling; I've felt that way ever since the election."

credit: The Guardian (U.K.)

Pushme-Pullyu Alert

They could just as well have named the two heads "Democrats" and "Senators-from-Maine".

Moo.

Obama sez: Abort or else, papists!

It says here that Obama I, Our King, Our Leader, has decreed that hereafter there shall be no protection for those who refuse to worship Moloch: to wit, any health care "provider" who refuses to "provide" death to an unborn child through the issuance of morning after poisons shall have no federal protection, and be subject to dismissal... or worse.

What happens when they take the next step: mandating abortion everywhere, even in Catholic hospitals?

Perhaps *that* will be our Dred Scott decision--when faithful Catholics throughout the country have to finally confront their failure to stop this train and we see the day when the Church has to close the entire Catholic health care system nation wide rather than accede to evil.

For it is objectively and forever evil to deliberately abort a child or assist another in so doing. Nothing, not all the Margaret Sangers, Frances Quisslings, or Hollyweird propaganda will ever change this.

I had no idea....

...that George W. Bush was also an accomplished rock singer.

He even did it on a pro-Bono basis....wasn't that nice of him?

"...the darndest things"

One thing to know about autistic kids is that they're very, very literal: they don't get double meanings at all. Furthermore, they don't know self-censorship. If it is thought, it gets said.

This makes for, shall we say, adventures in communication on occasion.

Well, last night The Old Silverback, having finished supper, was enjoying dessert--a fresh banana. I'd eaten about 2/3 of it when my youngest son came up to give me a hug.

The butt end of the banana went flying out of my hand and landed on the carpet. Ooops.

This morning, right before I left, again I was eating a banana when another son--this time my eldest--came up to give me a goodbye hug.

Again. Banana goes flying and ends up on carpet.

My eldest son looked me and said, "You're not too good with your banana, are you, Daddy?"

Fridge Pic #002: "'Nuf Said"

Credit: "Lucianne" (Lucianne.com)

Fridge Pic #001: "Kneel"

(I hereby institute a random feature of pics to be printed out and stuck on the fridge, next to the children's artwork from school.) (This also gives me the chance to learn the post-picture function on this blogger thing.)



Credit: "General Zod", Facebook (www.facebook.com)

Now THIS is movie magic!

It sez here that in New Zealand, a woman who had lost her legs as a child has been given an astonishing gift: a prosthetic "tail" like that of a mermaid that allows her to swim.

Apparently she wrote the guys at Weta Workshop, the special effects crew responsible for the Lord of the Rings trilogy as well as the Narnia series. They decided to do it as a lark--after all, they need to do something between film achievements--and they gave this lady the ability to swim.

Now this is an astounding achievement. I thought it was a silly story until I saw the pics. Those guys at Weta* (the NZ film crew, not the DC public TV station) are truly amazing.

*All this time I thought that "Weta" was, like WETA, an acronym or something. It turns out that the Weta is an six legged 'prehistoric cricket' endemic to NZ only. Ya learn something every day.

IIIII AAAAAMMMM OOOOOBBBBBBB

"....THE GREAAAAAAT AND POWERFULLLL....PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!"

Last night, I had a dream that I was watching The Wizard of Oz.... with an updated cast..... Sarah Palin as Dorothy... The Dub as The Scarecrow... McCain as the Cowardly Lion... Cheney as The Tin Man... Hillary as Glinda the Witch of the North... Michelle Obama as Witch West.... the MSM as an infinite number of flying monkeys (with typewriters)....

And the American People as the set of feet with the house (with unpaid mortgage) that just landed on it, blown there by an out of control whirlwind.

"A Creature of Legend"

Rotters reports the following:

Greeks shut airports, services to protest economy
Wed Feb 25, 2009 8:23am

ATHENS, Feb 25 (Reuters) - Greeks disgruntled by their country's economic woes ramped up protests against the government on Wednesday, shutting down airports and disrupting many public services.

Public schools and tax offices shut down, and services at ministries and public offices were suspended, as hundreds of workers marched to parliament with banners reading "No to pension reforms, privatisations and job cuts".

"Government policy ... only burdens workers, the unemployed and the poor," public sector umbrella union ADEDY, which represents 500,000 members, said in a statement.

How do we explain this behavior?

Through science fiction, of course: Niven and Pournelle's masterpiece The Mote in God's Eye:

(NOTE: Moties are three handed aliens who breed themselves into civil war every few decades or so.)

Renner's Motie seemed to search for a word. Visibly, she gave up "Renner, I must tell you of a creature of legend."

"Say on." Renner ... dialed for coffee. Coffee and stories, they went together.

"We will call him Crazy Eddie, if you like. He is a...he is like me, sometimes, and he is [an engineer], an idiot savant tinker, sometimes. Always he does the wrong things for excellent reasons. He does the same things over and over, and they always bring disaster, and he never learns."

There were small sounds of whispering in [Starship] MacArthur's wardroom. [Renner] said, "For instance?"

[Renner's Motie] paused to think. It said, "When a city has grown so overlarge and crowded that it is in immediate danger of collapse...when food and clean water flow into the city at a rate just sufficient to feed every mouth, and every hand must work constantly to keep it that way...when all transportation is involved in moving vital supplies, and none is left over to move people out of the city should the need arise...then it is that Crazy Eddie leads the movers of garbage out on strike for better working conditions."

There was considerable laughter ... [Renner] grinned and said, "I think I know the gentleman...."

(This post dedicated to my good friend Phil Rose.)

John C. Calhoun: An Evil Man, An Evil Philosophy

Doubt me? Witness THIS little gem by the man himself:

I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good, a positive good..... I hold then, that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other. ... I may say with truth, that in few countries so much is left to the share of the laborer, and so little exacted from him, or where there is more kind attention paid to him in sickness or infirmities of age. ... I fearlessly assert that the existing relation between the two races in the South, against which these blind fanatics are waging war, forms the most solid and durable foundation on which to rear free and stable political institutions. ... The condition of society in the South exempts us from the disorders and dangers resulting from this conflict; and which explains why it is that the political condition of the slaveholding States has been so much more stable and quiet than that of the North. . .