26 posts tagged “awesome”

I was reading an article about the pope's visit to America, and was pleased to see that it was positive.  I'm excited about this opportunity for American Catholics to see and hear the pope address them directly.  It doesn't happen every day, you know. 
But this article, well, it was funny.  Because it was humming along just fine until the very last paragraph.  Here it is:

Soprano Kathleen Battle has been enlisted to sing "The Lord's Prayer" - a decision the White House defended as appropriate despite the overt insertion of religion into a public event. "I think we've struck the right balance," Perino said. "Many people across America and across the world say that prayer in order to provide themselves comfort and confidence in getting their day started."

Notice anything funny there?  Because to me, it looks like we're debating whether we should sing a song that mentions God when we're hosting the freaking Pope.  Does it matter if it's a "public event?"  We put God on our money, and we have prayer before the sessions of Congress.  This doesn't rise beyond that level of public acknowledgment of God.
I believe the courts have determined that the use of "God" on our money is defensible from a standpoint that it is not an endorsement by the state of a particular religion, but is merely in this day and age a reflection of our shared traditions and history.  If our mottos were coined today I'm sure they would sound something like the Obama campaign rhetoric, but fortunately they were laid down in a time when men were able to speak openly in a public forum of their faith and its influence on their decisions.
May my grandchildren see the end of political correctness, I pray. 

Keep watching this Pope, my friends.  That includes you who aren't religious, and you who are primarily concerned with other things.  He may surprise you.  Suffice it to say that he can explain better than most of us why we believe what we believe about life, death, and what comes after.

Viva il Papa!

So, to those of you who do read this stuff I put up here, do you recall my post from a few days ago?  The one about Fred Thompson, in which I reasoned that if the Presidency is beyond his reach then he might at least be considered for the VP spot?  The better to shore up the conservative credentials of the eventual nominee, you see.

Well, I just saw on Fox News that the pundits have caught up with your boy Scio.  The ticker made mention of my very idea, not 10 minutes ago.

Which begs the question...Am I simply becoming more experienced in the way of politics, or do I have a secret readership? 

Come out, Chris Wallace!  I know you're there. 

I defy anyone to argue with Mark Steyn.  The man is simply a genius.  He makes me depressed by exposing how utterly screwed up the West's collective head is.  Is it any wonder that an Islamic group in Canada was trying to have him muzzled?

At some point conservatives will have to abandon the polite tolerance we've had for liberal inanities and fulfill their expectations by calling out the militia and rounding them up, Planet of the Apes style.  Har Har, of course I'm joking.  Or am I?  I've been accused of worse while arguing about less important things.

What's at issue here is that the absurdity of this generation's anti-war stance is without bounds.  Steyn drags it out into the light and clubs it like a baby seal.

UnphenomenalTimes
Fake but ... fake.

By Mark Steyn

Have you been in an airport recently, and maybe seen a gaggle of America’s heroes returning from Iraq? And you’ve probably thought, “Ah, what a marvelous sight. Remind me to straighten up the old ‘Support Our Troops’ fridge magnet, which seems to have slipped down below the reminder to reschedule my acupuncturist. Maybe I should go over and thank them for their service.”

No, no, no, under no account approach them. Instead, try to avoid making eye contact and back away slowly toward the sign for the parking garage. You’re in the presence of mentally damaged violent killers who could snap at any moment.

You hadn’t heard that? Well, it’s in the New York Times: “a series of articles” — that’s right, a whole series — “about veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed killings, or been charged with them, after coming home.” It’s an epidemic, folks. As the Times put it: “Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: ‘Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.’ Pierre, S.D.: ‘Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.’ Colorado Springs: ‘Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.’”

Obviously, as America’s “newspaper of record,” the Times would resent any suggestion that it’s anti-military. I’m sure if you were one of these crazed military stalker whackjobs following the reporters home you’d find their cars sporting the patriotic bumper sticker “We Support Our Troops, Even After They’ve Been Convicted.” As usual, the Times stories are written in the fey more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone that’s a shoo-in come Pulitzer time: “Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.”

“Patchwork picture,” “quiet phenomenon”… Yes, yes, but exactly how quiet is the phenomenon? How patchy is the picture?” The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan either “committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one.” The “committed a killing” formulation includes car accidents.

Thus, with declining deaths in theater, the media narrative evolves. Old story: “America’s soldiers are being cut down by violent irrational insurgents we can never hope to understand.” New story: “Americans are being cut down by violent irrational soldiers we can never hope to understand.” In the quagmire of these veterans’ minds, every leafy Connecticut subdivision is Fallujah and every Dunkin’ Donuts clerk an Abu Musab al-Zarqawi with an annoyingly perky manner.

It was the work of minutes for the Powerline website’s John Hinderaker to discover that the “quiet phenomenon” is entirely unphenomenal: It didn’t seem to occur to the Times to check whether the murder rate among recent veterans is higher than that of the general population of young men. It’s not. Au contraire, the columnist Ralph Peters calculated that Iraq and Afghanistan vets are about a fifth as likely to murder you as the average 18-34 year-old American male. Better yet, the blogger Iowahawk meticulously drew his own “patchwork picture” of another “quiet phenomenon”: the Denver newspaper columnist arrested for stalking, the Cincinnati TV reporter facing child-molestation charges, the Philadelphia anchorwoman who went on a violent drunken rampage. As Iowahawk’s one-man investigative unit wondered: “Unrelated incidents, or mounting evidence that America’s newsrooms have become a breeding ground for murderous, drunk, gun-wielding child molesters?”

Why would the Times run such a series? My columnar confrere Clifford May connected it to a notorious anniversary: Seventy-five years ago, in February 1933, the Oxford Union passed a famous resolution, by an overwhelming margin, that “this House would under no circumstances fight for its King and country.” The Union was the world’s most famous debating society, in a great university of the dominant global power; its presidents have gone on to serve as Prime Ministers at home and overseas, from Gladstone in the 19th century all the way to Benazir Bhutto in the 1990s.

So the debate and its resolution sent a message to Britain’s enemies: As Churchill saw it, the vote was a “disgusting symptom” of the enervation of the ruling elites. Clifford May sees that same syndrome today around the western world, but, in fact, it’s worse than that.

The Oxford debate took place a decade and a half after the worst carnage in human history. The First World War cost the lives of some 20 million people. Do you remember back in 2004 when Ted Koppel devoted one episode of Nightline to reading out the names of everyone killed in combat in Iraq? If he’d attempted a similar task with the British Empire’s war dead in 1919, the half-hour episode of Nightline would have had to be extended to ten months — or longer if Ted took bathroom breaks, or indeed pauses for breath. The war reached into the smallest English hamlet and culled a generation of young men. It swept through the glittering palaces, too: The brother of Queen Elizabeth (the mother of the present queen) was killed on the western front in 1915. It would be a statistical improbability to have been at that Oxford Union debate and have come from a home in which on some mantle or bureau there was not a photograph of a son or uncle or fiancé forever young.It would be as if millions upon millions had been slaughtered in the first Gulf war, and 15 years later Harvard or Yale were debating whether we should do it all over again.

In other words, we don’t have their excuse. Our war has one of the lowest fatality rates of any war ever, and, when they get so low that even Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid temporarily give up the quagmire bleating, the Times invents bogus stories to suggest that the few veterans lucky enough to make it out of Iraq alive are ticking timebombs ready to explode across every Main Street in the land.

A few days before the Times series began, The National Journal published the latest debunking of a notorious survey: in 2006, the medical journal The Lancet reported that the Iraq war had killed over 650,000 civilians, over 90 percent victims of the US military. That’s 500 civilians a day. Which is quite a smell test. The figure was over ten times the estimates even of hardcore antiwar left-wing groups. Who are these 500 daily victims? Why aren’t there mass riots by Iraqi civilians protesting the daily bloodbath?

Because it’s fake. It didn’t happen.

Yet it’s indestructible. I picked up a local paper in New Hampshire the other day, and a lady psychotherapist was twittering about our “mentally wounded” troops returning home after killing gazillions and bazillions of Iraqi civilians. In 1933, the debaters at Oxford were horrified by the real cost of war. In 2008, the editors of the Times, our college professors and Hollywood celebrities, are horrified by a fiction. Faced with an historically low cost of war, they retreat into fantasy. Who’s really suffering from mental trauma? Who needs the psychotherapy here?

My friend W manages to find the most interesting sites on the Internet.  Apparently Cracked, the lesser-known periodical in the style of Mad, has switched to online content.  And it's hilarious.  Observe.

One contributor wishes for an improved Real Time Strategy game.  Wish number 14:

14. I want fat, left-wing documentarians carefully editing the only the most incriminating footage, countered only by low-IQ country music singers crooning my praises while in American flag-colored cowboy hats.

My new favorite place to visit.

Today in Norfolk, VA it is 76 degrees Fahrenheit.  It is also December 10th, so you would think that there is something going on here.  Perhaps a sign of increasing global temperatures?  Or something.

But you'd be wrong.  In my memory, the Tidewater region of Virginia has always had fairly schizophrenic Decembers.  It goes back and forth between cold and warm all month.  While today's temp might be a record (since records started being kept), it's hardly unusual to have weather in the high 60s at this time of year.  It doesn't start to become steadily cold until February, when we might actually get some snow.

Virginia itself doesn't have much in the way of weather extremes either way.  It does sometimes become oppressively hot, but nothing compared to Mississippi.  And it does sometimes become bitter cold, but not quite in the same league as your New England states. 

I basically live in an awesome climate. 

Upon the enthusiastic recommendation of a friend, I recently began reading the personal recollections of one Peter Hathaway Capstick, a professional hunter who seems to have stepped out of the 1880s.  His book Death in the Long Grass has at once inflamed my passions and shamed me for my lack of manly pursuits.  It is a sobering look at the high mortality rate suffered by natives and hunters alike on the African continent. 

While at first one might think that Capstick would wax poetic about the diminishing game and the sheer horror of the rare animal attack, he does neither.  In fact, he shatters the illusions of the Animal Planet types with breathtaking, scotch-soaked contempt.  Not only does he attest to the plentiful amount of dangerous game, he also details several different animals and their sometimes homicidal urges. 
His writing is witty, straightforward and rich in imagery.  He relates the gore-soaked attacks of lions on hapless victims, and decries the myth that only old and feeble beasts stalk man.  Did you know that 90% of the man-eating lions which were killed were reported to be in good or fair condition?  Neither did I.  Disney certainly screwed me on that one.
Not only does Capstick provide evidence that hunting in Africa is still as dangerous for the man as for the animal, he also details how it is the hunters themselves who provide the most care for the game.  Anyone who lives in a rural community knows that it is the deer-hunters who prevent starvation and disease amongst their prey by thinning the herd.  Capstick's account, while admittedly dated from the 1970s, lays out the fact that it is the efforts of hunters which contribute the most towards protection of wildlife. 

I have yet to complete the book, but am eagerly awaiting the chapter on the hippo. 

And W, I'm pretty sure we would both be killed if we tried any of this.

Taking for Granted
This country’s survival is not automatic. What we do will determine that.

By Thomas Sowell

When my research assistant and her husband took my wife and me to dinner at a Chinese restaurant, I was impressed when I heard her for the first time speak Chinese as she ordered food.

My assistant was born and raised in China, so I should have been impressed that she spoke English. But I took that for granted because she always spoke English to me.

We all have a tendency to take for granted what we are used to, and to regard it as somehow natural or automatic — and to be unduly impressed by what is unusual.

Too many Americans take the for granted and are too easily impressed by what people in other countries say and do.

That is especially true of the intelligentsia, and dangerously true of those Supreme Court justices who cite foreign laws when making decisions about American law.

There is nothing automatic about the way of life achieved in this country. It is very unusual among the nations of the world today and rarer than four-leaf clovers in the long view of history.

It didn’t just happen. People made it happen — and they and those who came after them paid a price in blood and treasure to create and preserve this nation that we now take for granted.

More important, this country’s survival is not automatic. What we do will determine that.

Too many Americans today are not only unconcerned about what it will take to preserve this country but are busy dismantling the things that make it .

Our national motto, “E Pluribus Unum” — from many, one — has been turned upside down as educators, activists and politicians strive to fragment the American population into separate racial, social, linguistic and ideological blocs.

Some are gung ho for generic “change” — without the slightest concern that the change might be for the worse, even in a world where most nations that are different are also worse off.

Most are worse economically and many are much worse off in terms of despotism, corruption, and bloodshed.

History is full of nations and even whole civilizations that have fallen from the heights to destitution and disintegration.

The is a classic example, but the great ancient Chinese dynasties, the , and many others have met the same fate.

These were not just political “changes.” They were historic catastrophes from which whole peoples did not recover for centuries.

It has been estimated that it was a thousand years before Europeans again achieved as high a standard of living as they had in Roman times. The Dark Ages were called dark for a reason.

Today, whole classes of people get their jollies and puff themselves up by denigrating and denouncing American society.

Such people are a major influence in our media, in our educational system and among all sorts of vocal activists.

Nothing illustrates their power to distort reality like the way they seize upon slavery to denounce American society.

Slavery was cancerous but does anybody regard cancer in the as an evil peculiar to American society? It is a worldwide affliction and so was slavery.

Both the enslavers and the enslaved have included people on every inhabited continent — people of every race, color, and creed.

More Europeans were enslaved and taken to by pirates alone than there were African slaves taken to the and to the colonies from which it was formed.

Yet throughout our educational system, our media, and in politics, slavery is incessantly presented as if it were something peculiar to black and white Americans.

What was peculiar about the was that it was the first country in which slavery was under attack from the moment the country was created.

What was peculiar about Western civilization was that it was the first civilization to destroy slavery, not only within its own countries but in other countries around the world as well.

Reality has been stood on its head so that a relative handful of people can feel puffed up or gain notoriety and power. Whatever they gain, the rest of us have everything to lose.

forgive the formatting of this post...it was copied from word and I am lazy.

So reality has just hit home for Paris Hilton.  The poor darling.  Not only has she been ordered to carry out her full sentence in prison, but she can't even count on her parents to bail her out.  I do actually feel bad for her. 
Think about it.  All her life she has never actually had to work for anything.  Momentary inconveniences were just that.  She had the connections, the wealth and the privilege to run with the world's elite.  Her television show was nothing more than a long giggle she and Nicole Richie shared over how awful it must be for people to actually do work that doesn't involve being photographed.  She's everything that is wrong with American youth, a paragon of materialism and self-involvement.  She is the face of entitlement. 
When the judge handed down his ruling today, Paris Hilton screamed.  In court, the girl (she ain't a woman) shrieked at the utter horror of it all.  In light of the events of the past few days, in which the sheriff of LA found her mysterious medical condition to be pressing enough to remove her from the special needs unit of her prison and into home confinement, I confess to feeling a certain sense of unfairness in that maneuver.  Medical condition my fanny, said I.  Paris doesn't really deserve any extra breaks.  This is, after all, only the second out of three offenses for which she has been charged...which confirms that Hilton is in fact stupid or bleary from drugs.  At any rate, I am suspicious of the sheriff's motivations here.  Either he or the medical advice he received was fishy. 
So she does 45 days.  Maybe less.  I can't decide if it's a crime to send such a child to jail.  And since they won't let us know what "medical condition" might warrant taking a rich 20-something white girl out of a light prison sentence, I can't make a real judgment.  I'm pretty sure that she can find at least 10 other women in that prison who will share her "condition" and will be serving much longer sentences.

I mean really...calling for your mommy?  Be a grown-up for Pete's sake!  You broke the law and got caught...three times!  You are the one who decided to do that.  Your mother can't take it away, Paris.  You should have married that nice Greek boy, he would have straightened you out.

Due to a phone request from W, I have shaken off my lethargy to write a post and share with you my unique and utterly incontrovertible viewpoints on life.

Actually, it's unfair of me to call myself lethargic for not posting recently.  In truth, I have been very active this past week.  Last Saturday I traveled down to Gulfport, Mississippi to take part in the annual Americorps Build-a-Thon.  In case you missed it, they had a hurricane down there a while ago called Katrina that caused quite a bit of damage.  The prognosis is not good.  Thousands of homes destroyed or uninhabitable, thousands of people displaced, and dollars untold in damage. 
Rebuilding is not an option, obviously.  It is a mandate.  But this is made difficult because of the sheer amount of work to be done.  Further, this is a great opportunity for contractors because of the high demand for their services.  But where are they going to work?  Where the money is, of course, and that is not in the hands of people who couldn't afford decent homes before Katrina.  So what's the answer?
The answer, dear friends, is good old American volunteerism.  This past week I was engaged in one of the most-needed ongoing volunteer efforts in the country.  Thousands of people from all walks of life have passed through Louisiana, Mississippi, et al. and donated their time and talents to help those who through misfortune and circumstance are unable to afford a decent place to live.  That's what Americans do when they see their countrymen knocked about...it's a hand up, not a handout, in case there were any doubts about how I could support something like this with my conservative leanings.  Helping people who need it goes beyond politics and into the realm of human obligation.
As part of my service in Americorps (which is kind of like Peace Corps for America [Also, strangely, a suggestion from W as I floundered about following graduation last year]) I have been involved with Habitat for Humanity as a Volunteer and Construction Coordinator.  It's rewarding work, but also draining.  This week was a welcome vacation from the familiar sites of my own affiliate. 
The goal for the past week was to build 20 houses.  With 600 people from all over the country, it went much better than I thought it would.  My team completed our house, as did our neighbor.  Most other houses got through to finishing the tar-paper and siding.  It was something to see, and I was filled with an intense satisfaction and happiness that I have felt very few times in my life. 
I thought a lot this week on what my service means to me.  I came to a couple interesting conclusions.  Firstly, I think it's important for people to engage in some sort of service in order to understand better the human condition.  It's not just about a bullet on the resume or appeasing your own vanity.  That's key.  What I did this week was help someone I've never met or spoken to in my life, and who I will most likely never see again.  I did it for no other reason than to help.  I get nothing from it in terms of material compensation.  I think that the central aspect to this service is that I diminished myself and served a larger, nobler purpose.  It was not in the slightest about me, though there were many thanks and much appreciation from the homeowners.  It's good for somebody like me, who suffers from his fair share of vanity.
A second point I made to myself, and which we share with you, is the sincere camaraderie that developed between those of us working towards this common goal.  We were all there to serve this Good Thing and our politics or religion or race or social class didn't matter at all.  The feeling for me was overwhelmingly positive and I know that in years to come I will look back fondly on the people with whom I served.  I hope they shall do the same.
Thinking about the week, the service, and the difference I helped make overwhelms me somewhat.  I am glad this is not a speech or my voice would perhaps start to hitch.  At the beginning of my service I thought it was all cotton-candy nonsense when people would get choked up about this, but I understand better now.  It's so huge, and to be a part of it is so deeply fulfilling.  I'm not sure if I could have understood it without doing it.
From the article:

George Sauls said he was shocked at how many people wanted to help his and other families on the Coast.

"All these people giving their time and their lives, it was totally out of my realm of belief," said Sauls. "I didn't know there were that many people in the world like that."

Neither did I.  My inner cynic has a black eye.
I'll close with an appeal:  If you are searching for something that eludes you, if you have a hole somewhere that success doesn't fill, if you are compelled, if you are bored, if you are driven, if you are rich, if you are poor, if you are uneducated or a doctor...serve others.  Do it once in your life, serve without expecting reward.  Do something big, or do something small.  Just do it and don't think about how it will help you down the road or whether it makes you look better.  Help somewhere.  Then maybe this post won't seem so overblown.