It's Not About Me

Mistakes Were Made

It's been another peaceful week in the good ol' US of A with mass murders in Texas and Florida. Driving home tonight I was listening to "All Things Considered" on NPR. One individual, who worked with the Army psychiatrist who killed 13, described him as a doctor who took good care of his patients, but that "sometimes people make bad choices". I'm sure that the families of the dead and wounded will take great comfort in knowing that it was just a "bad choice" that led to the carnage.

One of C.S. Lewis' oft quoted quotes is, "We laugh at Honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate, and bid the geldings be fruitful." And so we train our professional,s as well as our young, in considering murder, theft and rape in the psychobabble of "bad choices".  From before they can read our children's lesson is:  We are created from chaos, by accident and our destiny is oblivion. For some reason, unknown to those teachers, we are to behave and have meaningful lives between these two bookends of nothingness. Then follows the shock (shock!) when the massacres ensue.

 

"If Chance be the Father of all flesh,
 Disaster is his rainbow in the sky.
 And when you hear,

`State Of Emergency!'

`Sniper Kills Ten!'

`Youths Go Looting!'

`Bomb Blasts School!'

It is but the sound of man worshipping his maker."

    - Steve Turner

Cash For Codgers

This must be true. I read it on the Internet.

Democrats, realizing the success of the President's "Cash For Clunkers" rebate program, have revamped a major portion of their National Health Care Proposal.

They are expected to make this major announcement at a news conference later this week. 

I have obtained an advanced copy of the proposal which is named....

"CASH FOR CODGERS" and it works like this.... Couples wishing to access health care funds in order to pay for the delivery of a child will be required to turn in one old person. The amount the government grants them will be fixed according to a sliding scale.  Older and more prescription dependent codgers will garner the highest amounts.

Special "Bonuses" will be paid for those submitting codgers in targeted groups, such as smokers, alcohol drinkers, persons 10 pounds over their government prescribed weight, and any member of the Republican Party.

Smaller bonuses will be given for codgers who consume beef, soda, fried foods, potato chips, lattes, whole milk, dairy products, bacon, Brussels sprouts, or Girl Scout Cookies.



All codgers will be rendered totally useless via toxic injection.  This will insure that they are not secretly resold or their body parts harvested to keep other codgers in repair.

Waiting For Oslo

It's been a yucky, damp-cold, freezing-rain kind of weekend. Just perfect for waiting by the phone, expecting the Norwegians to call me at any minute with the $1.4 million prize. I'm expecting a Nobel in either medicine or literature - not sure which one. I mean surely with my medical savvy I have the same potential for achieving a cure for cancer as the President does for achieving peace with the Islamic world. And this blog is clear evidence that some day I might write a great novel...

It's A No-Brainer

So let me get this straight…
This health care plan will be written by a committee whose head says he doesn't understand it, passed by a Congress that hasn't read it and whose members will be exempt from it, signed by a president who smokes, funded by a treasury chief who did not pay his taxes, overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, managed with the simplicity and efficiency of Medicare/Medicaid, at nearly the cost of the military, and financed by a country that is dead broke…
What could possibly go wrong?

(passed around on the web)

Dividing Politicians

"If you add a Democrat and a Republican and divide by two - you don't get truth."  - Seth Richardson

Winston Churchill - Looking Back, Looking Forward

I've started digging in to the bazillion pages of Winston Churchill's epic "The Second World War". Volume 1, "The Gathering Storm", is almost 700 pages of tiny print. Here's a short section from early on in the book that is both beautifully written and timeless in its advice (written 1948):

"There can hardly have been a war more easy to prevent than this second Armageddon. I have always been ready to use force in order to defy tyranny or ward off ruin. But had our British, American and Allied affairs been conducted with the ordinary consistency and common sense usual in decent households there was no need for Force to march unaccompanied by Law: and Strength, moreover, could have been used in righteous causes with little risk of bloodshed. In their loss of purpose, in their abandonment even of the themes they most sincerely espoused, Britain, France and most of all, because of their immense power and impartiality, the United States, allowed conditions to be gradually built up which led to the very climax they dreaded most. They have only to repeat the same well-meaning, short-sighted behaviour towards the new problems which in singular resemblance confront us today to bring about a third convulsion from which none may live to tell the tale."

 

Soma

   

Don't Look To Alaska

John McCain should have looked to Peggy Noonan for his VP running partner. Sure she can be stupidly partisan. Sure she backed Bush II for way too long, but she is also one of the consistently clear-thinking grown-ups on the national stage. This week her WSJ article was a surprisingly scathing condemnation of Sarah Palin. No where was it mean. It just said what needed to be said. I was never the less surprised. Below is a snippet of her response to the critique that backing away from Palin means the aploplectic, main-stream media won.

"Turning to others means the media won!" No, it means they lose. What the mainstream media wants is not to kill her but to keep her story going forever. She hurts, as they say, the Republican brand, with her mess and her rhetorical jabberwocky and her careless causing of division. Really, she is the most careless sower of discord since George W. Bush, who fractured the party and the movement that made him. Why wouldn't the media want to keep that going?

Here's why all this matters. The world is a dangerous place. It has never been more so, or more complicated, more straining of the reasoning powers of those with actual genius and true judgment. This is a time for conservative leaders who know how to think.

Here are a few examples of what we may face in the next 10 years: a profound and prolonged American crash, with the admission of bankruptcy and the spread of deep social unrest; one or more American cities getting hit with weapons of mass destruction from an unknown source; faint glimmers of actual secessionist movements as Americans for various reasons and in various areas decide the burdens and assumptions of the federal government are no longer attractive or legitimate.

The era we face, that is soon upon us, will require a great deal from our leaders. They had better be sturdy. They will have to be gifted. There will be many who cannot, and should not, make the cut. Now is the time to look for those who can. And so the Republican Party should get serious, as serious as the age...

And in the "I Told You So Dept.", I wrote about moving to the Republic of Idaho before Peggy's remarks re: secession came out.

The photo is from the WSJ article and the full article by Peggy Noonan can be found at:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124716984620819351.html

America - Rudderless

"I haven't read a single one of them, and if I'm fortunate before we end this, I won't have to read one of them."    - Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on the opinions from the bench of US Supreme Court nominee Sonisa Sotomayer.

Has it always been this way and I'm just naive (or not paying attention), or is it completely hopeless and we need to start over again? I just watched "Friday Night Lights", and I know I could never move to the Republic of Texas. Now the Republic of Idaho - that could be a possibility.

Wilson On Republican Hypocrisy

From Doug Wilson's "Blog & Mablog"  (6/26/09)

 

Making Hypocrisy Possible is a Cultural Virtue
Topic: Sex and Culture

Paul Begala has said that the GOP should stop lecturing everybody about sex -- because of the hypocrisy recently manifested in the behavior of Sen. Ensign and Gov. Sanford. But this overlooks the important role of hypocrisy in every decent society. As it has been well observed, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. When virtue is publicly honored, there will be those who do not live up to that standard but who nevertheless want to  be known as men who live up to it. As long as we have a fallen world, and we honor what we ought to honor -- marital fidelity, say -- we will have this problem.

It is no solution at all to remove the discrepancy the way the left has done, which is by dropping the honor of virtue. This is what Begala in essence is saying. But it is a good thing that there are still political parties and regions of the country where you can wreck your public life by what you do in private. It was no virtue for Gov. Sanford to head off to Argentina, but it was a cultural virtue that made going to Argentina necessary.

But there is a lesson for randy Republicans in this. Stop trying to save the country without explicit and ongoing dependence on Jesus Christ. If Jesus Christ is not Lord over all, then Begala is right.