Sucker Punches, One & Two

First, it was Frank Gaffney and his PBS production of Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center. Squelch.

Now it's Ken Burns' latest documentary for PBS on World War II; The War. Capitulation.

Apparently Not Insane

Taranto:

Saturday afternoon found us at UCLA for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, where we had been summoned from New York to sit on a panel discussing "the future of news" with L.A. Times editor Jim O'Shea and ABC-TV's Mark Halperin. The moderator was the Times's foreign editor, Marjorie Miller. All agreed: The future of news is uncertain, though the Web is likely to be an important factor. [...]

Two truthers, a man and a woman, were standing in line to ask questions. The man prefaced his by saying, "I'm not going to ask the 9/11 question again." (We don't remember what he did ask.) When it was the woman's turn, she went into a long disquisition about how FDR had advance warning of Pearl Harbor, and "buildings don't fall at 10 stories a second," and finally she asked, "Where is our Bob Woodward to bring the story out?"

Our answer: "Rosie O'Donnell."

The woman started speechifying again and finally was shouted down by the crowd, which was strongly left-leaning but apparently not insane. (Emphasis mine)[...]

Warning, Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!

Today, class, as an introduction to American literary high culture, I quote to you from the literary cultural genius written on a can of mixed nuts:

Ingredients: Peanuts (blanched and unblanched), cashews, almonds, Brazil nuts, pecans, macadamia nuts, vegetable oil (peanut, cottonseed, soybean and/or sunflower seed), salt.

ALLERGY WARNING: CONTAINS ALMONDS, BRAZIL NUTS, CASHEWS, MACADAMIA NUTS, PECANS, PEANUTS. MANUFACTURED IN A FACILITY THAT PROCESSES MILK, EGGS, FILBERTS, PINE NUTS, PISTACHIOS, WALNUTS, WHEAT, SOYBEANS. (Emphasis in original)

If you aren't touched by the eloquent depth and beauty of this intellectual artform, you aren't a true soul-less American bureaucrat.

Twin Terrors

Lance posts:

I hereby announce my retirement from the National Football League.

What? Well, no, I never actually worked for the NFL. Or for any NFL team. Never actually played, never had my name on a roster, never got invited to a training camp, or a pre-draft workout, or even a draft-day party.

So maybe “retirement” isn’t exactly the word. The point is: this year, I will not be entering the NFL draft.

It’s the end of an era.

Every year since, roughly, 1988, I’ve made myself available for the NFL draft. Every year, I’ve sat by the phone, waiting for the call. It never came. [...]

Okay, so I’m being ridiculous. I never played college ball. I was a mediocre lineman in high school. I’m slow, clumsy, can’t get rim on the basketball court, and my spirals are, shall we say, shaky. [...]

Yep, freakishly fearsome ol' #77 (and also ol' bro #75) opened holes big enough to drive trucks through. It's just too bad all the Horlick runners that he opened them for are in prison. Most of them were arrested for shoplifting. They would have gotten away, but as they fled the stores at full sprint clerks caught them from behind. Too bad they didn't have Lance blocking for them during those plays.

Belated Happy Birthday

I had forgotten Grandpa Jerry's birthday yesterday. This birthday marks his last year of youth. Next comes the advanced AARP status, joining Grandpa John and Grandma Jean; Old coots all.




Life of labor at GM, the U.S. Navy, and return to G.M., but now he works for the Canadians.

As a youth Jerry was somewhat of a shyster. We moved to Janesville when he was seven. In a mere three years he had built a solid reputation:

[April 28] 1958 - Field Training Begins for Janesville Police Officers
On this date field training commenced for 49 members of the Janesville Auxiliary Police Corps, as they accompanied regular officers on their patrols and beats. When their duty assignments required uniforms, they wore helmets, belts, and Civil Defense armbands. The auxiliary cops helped direct traffic, assisted at accidents, took notes on investigations done by official cops and were on the lookout for stolen vehicles. [Source: Janesville Gazette]

I want to give Grandpa Jerry a gift for his birthday, a picture of his favorite celebrity:



Nothing is quite as thrilling as sitting at the controls of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun.

Happy Birthday, Jerry. Don't forget to check your blood pressure.

Go for a Visit

Here's a site with a lot of interesting essays that is new to me and I also assume to most everyone else as well, judging from the sparsity of comments. It is titled Intellectual Conservative- 'Conservative and Libertarian Politics and Philosophy'.

Marie Crashes the Earth Day Festival

A California blogger named Marie posts about her booth at a local Earth Day Festival.

I tried to avoid having a booth at Earth Day today; honestly I did. I am getting so stinkin' uncomfortable with the whole global warming business, the totalitarian nature of all the demands, the whole earth worship thing. . .but I got a free booth, and capitalism won out. [...]

I get to have a booth at our local Earth Day Festival, comrade, because of our biodegradable cleaning supplies. As usual, though, the ecological crowds bought exactly zero cleaning supplies. Instead, they were buying vanilla, and candles, and dry oil body spray. I even sold a hat and a shirt!

Whatever. The money is green.

Never thought of it like that before, but capitalists have to be the greenest of the greens.



Marie doesn't say whether the hat and shirt she sold were like the one she depicted in the picture above. One can only hope.

Well-educated, Rational, Sensible

Wicked Dox publishes an article written by Melanie Yeager in 2004 titled 'FSU prof praised for role in book on Nazi war criminals'.

Excerpts:

When a publisher first approached Robert Gellately about editing a psychiatrist's interviews with Nazi war criminals, he wasn't so keen on the idea. [...]

Now the book the Florida State University professor fine-tuned - "The Nuremberg Interviews" - is being heralded for giving the world new insights into the chilling thoughts of Nazi leaders responsible for the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of more than 6 million Jews during World War II. [...]

"There is this kind of inner logic behind the outer madness," Gellately said of the book's 33 interviews. "That's the horror of the thing." That's because, Gellately said, for the most part, these Nazi rulers were as normal as next-door neighbors. "I think we all have an idea about what makes the Nazis tick. Some of us think they were demonic or crazy ... Really, two people in the book are like that, but they are not the interesting ones," Gellately said. "Most of the other ones are like you and me. They are well-educated, rational, sensible."

They pour out their thoughts to Dr. Leon Goldensohn, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, who kept detailed notes of his interviews with the war criminals and witnesses awaiting trial in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1946. [...]

"They had a sense of duty, perverted, but they were rational, kind of cold, calculating killers," he said, "not this emotional, go-out-and-shoot-their-friend-in-the-woods kind of thing. You can't prove these were guys that actually hated the Jews or actually ever hit anyone." [...]

He was a quiet guy and kinda kept to himself, but he seemed nice... 'til he brought out the chainsaw.

Livin' the Good Life

Marc Morano, CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer, reports in an article titled 'Diaperless Babies Seen As Earth-Friendly Solution':

As environmentalists celebrate the 34th annual Earth Day, some in the green movement are now advocating "diaper-free" babies to help save the planet. [...]

"There is a way to have a baby and NOT use diapers," says one website advocating diaperless babies. Parents are urged to get in tune with their infant's body signals and hold babies over toilets, buckets and shrubbery or any other convenient receptacle when nature calls.

One advocate suggests bringing a "tight-lidded bucket" along to serve as a waste receptacle when mothers take their babies out in public. [...]

Umbra Fisk, advice columnist for Grist Magazine..."People around the world who have no access to diapers manage to raise children, and a small group of parents in diaper-rich countries have decided to follow their lead. Around here, it's called 'elimination communication' or 'diaper-free,'" Fisk wrote. [...]

"The concept is logical and simple: Infants give recognizable signs of imminent peeing and pooping; it's possible to learn your infant's signs; infant pee isn't frightening; and if you train your kid to ignore their outputs, you'll just have to go back and retrain them when traditional potty-training time arrives," Fisk explained. [...]

"When David was born, I started to think about the kind of world I was making for him to grow up in. The thought of garbage spewing and sprawling landfills filled me with horror. And right along with this horror were those little mother's helpers, disposable diapers...rotting, but never really going away in all their plastic glory," Natec wrote. [...]

Scott Noelle, editor of the Continuum Concept website...In my mind, diapers became the symbol of the Evil Empire of Western Parenting in which babies must suffer to accommodate the needs of their parents' broken-continuum culture: a controlled, sterile, odorless, wall-to-wall carpeted fortress in which to live with the illusion of dominion over nature," wrote Noelle, on the website livingharmony.com. [...]

"How I longed for a simple, dirt-floored, baby-friendly hut like that of a Yequana family," he wrote. [...]

That's not the peanut butter, honey. I just recycled the 'tight-lidded' jar.

Can't we just tape one square of toilet paper on 'em?

Grandpa Jerry
Baseball Prognosticator

Although a man of few words, Grandpa Jerry was asked how the Brewers would do against the defending world champion St. Louis Cardinals this year. He reached into his pocket and responded tersely:

Ideas Have Consequences

"Although my ideas are in the earliest stages of development, they are, in my mind, worth investigating."

"One of my favorites is in the area of conserving trees which we heavily rely on for oxygen. I propose a limitation be put on how many squares of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting."

"Now, I don't want to rob any law-abiding American of his or her God-given rights, but I think we are an industrious enough people that we can make it work with only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where two to three could be required."-Sheryl Crow 1

I'm a good person. I want to 'make a difference'... for the children.

But my stepdaughter had one of 'those pesky occasions'!


My wife, Linda, more pragmatic than Kim or me, simply commented,
"READ BETWEEN THE LINES!"

The Troglodyte Twins' Study:
Trogloxenes, Troglobites, & Modern Subcultures

I have two researchers in my secret basement laboratory that have done much pioneering work documenting the inception and evolutionary development of subcultures within the mainstream society of the United States. After reading a paper that they had written about me and my anti-social milieu in the late 70's, I could only meekly ask, "Did I do thaaat?"

These two have also become quite the experts in spelunking. They shall not be named for purposes of national security as well as basement lab anonymity, but we have affectionately named them the Troglodyte Twins. Recently they began incorporating observations of cave life with that of certain subcultures in American life. Their conclusions have been quite illuminating.

The Trog Twins' main research has been the symbiotic relationship between two categories of cave dwellers; the trogloxenes and the troglobites. Trogloxenes, in this case bats, sleep in the caves, but are generally considered to 'belong' to surface ecosystems. Troglobites, in this case certain species of roaches, live their entire lives within the caves and have developed morphological and physiological changes commensurate with their lifestyles. Some of these t'bite adaptations include blindness, body size, scales, and aggressiveness.

After foraging for insects, fruits, and blood in the darkness of the night world outside the cave, the bats return to sleep during the day suspended from the ceilings of the caves. These tiny ecologists neither use toilet paper nor diaper their young. Their excrement and urine is dropped indiscreetly onto the cave floor.

The cave floor is immediately transformed into a 5 star roach restaurant, and a very popular one at that. Soon the guano eating pretender flunkies inundate the entire stockpile created by the bats with a party resembling Times Square on New Year's Eve or a 'love-in' in downtown Damascus after the publication of the Danish cartoons. Tons of fun for everyone.

The insightful Troglodyte Twins immediately recognized the similarity to the development and maintenance of one particular subculture in American society; the modern leftist environmental/antiwar subculture. Bats like Al Gore, John Kerry, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi; 'belongers' to the mainstream culture, search the darkness feeding on bugs, fruits, and taxpayer blood. After gorging themselves, they return to the cave and rain excrement upon the blind, scaly, aggressive troglodites living their lives entirely within the confines of their caves. They accept no other sustenance from life on the outside, but feast like gluttons solely on the feces fed to them by the progressive trogloxenes.

The Twins have even discovered a new species of bat, but because they are true professionals, they humbly refused to name it after themselves. Instead, they accurately named it after its own characteristics; Diphylla algoreaus, the hairy-legged liberal vampire bat.

They are also researching the possibility of a newly discovered cave cockroach, but are not totally satisfied that it is not actually a Blaberus craniifer, true death's head cockroach. If indeed they find that it is a new species, they will name it Blaberus sheehanifer, true death's head hissing cockroach.

The Troglodyte Twins kept us entertained all day among the test tubes, Erlenmeyer flasks, Petri dishes, and electron microscopes. They dramatized their work by crawling under tables with their helmets and headlights through little piles of lab rat feces. We are nominating them for the Nobel Prize in Medical Economic Literature.

Eyes on France

Associated Press Writer Herve Brival in Fort de France, Martinique, contributed to this report:

France began choosing a new president Sunday with millions of voters undecided and millions more voting for the first time, making the selection of two final candidates highly unpredictable.

The successor to Jacques Chirac, ending 12 years as head of state at the close of his second term, will face a large and listless economy and an alienated young Muslim population, among a host of problems.

Only four of the 12 candidates, including conservative front-runner Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist Segolene Royal, who was No. 2 in polls, had a real chance of making it to a final round of voting May 6. [...]

Sarkozy, blunt, reformist and pro-American, was frightening to many French. Royal presented a smiling, feminist mother-figure. Scholarly farmer's son Francois Bayrou could pull off a surprise win, and the anti-immigrant nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen was still counting on big support, in hopes of repeating his shock 2002 second-place finish.

Sarkozy, long leading in polls, is ready to build a new pro-American French foreign policy, and proudly shook President Bush's hand last year. He talks of a "rupture" with the past, including painful reforms of worker-friendly labor laws to make France more competitive. He has toned down his rhetoric in the campaign, but many predict he will revive it if elected.

Royal said she would never shake Bush's hand without letting him know what she thought of his policies first. She says her France would be different because she would be its first woman president. She has tilted away from some of her Socialist Party's policies, but her economic plan would lean left and reverse some reforms of the Chirac era.

Sarkozy and Royal are both in their 50s, carry iPods and appealed to young voters in Internet campaigns. Both infiltrated the political system from the outside _ Royal as a woman, Sarkozy as the son of a Hungarian immigrant. [...]

I may have to curtail my French bashing. Blogging will be slow.

Lenin, Green With Envy

Mac Johnson, in a post in Human Events titled 'You Da Man':

[...] During the period from about 1960 to the fall of the Berlin wall at the end of 1989, the message of the Red left was that Capitalism was exploiting the world, America was destroying the world, and the only solution was for the international intelligentsia to run the world.

Contrast this with the much-improved message of the modern Green left, which is… that Capitalism is exploiting the world, America is destroying the world, and the only solution is for the international intelligentsia to run the world. [...]

So case closed -- nature is a much better excuse for organized misanthropy than claiming to represent something as troublesome as other humans. In fact, Environmentalism is the highest manifestation of what I call a “Third Party” cause. Third Party causes work like this: Suppose you’re a jerk and you act like it for no reason. Why, I and others will all think you’re a jerk. But now, suppose you inform everybody that you are not just a jerk, you are angry for a cause, a good cause -- the sort of cause that makes you acting like a jerk entirely understandable, because you’re full of righteous indignation (as opposed to the petty kind.) You’re not a jerk at all; you’re a champion for some helpless Third Party, say, workers and peasants… or darters and pheasants. It doesn’t matter exactly, because you’re just too damn mad/concerned/upset/outraged/caring to piddle about details. My goodness, the Earth is in danger -- out of my way, idiot! [...]

All in all, it seems entirely appropriate (and again, purely coincidental) that Earth Day is celebrated on Lenin’s birthday. One wonders whether the Greenies simply had to purchase some old mailing lists.

Some call them 'Watermelons', green on the outside and pink on the inside.


However, there is also an alternate view of Watermelons.

Guess it won't be long before I have one, too.

Erik Estrada gets star on Walk of Fame

Server Overload

Grandpa John's has been on the cutting edge of the blogosphere for nearly 3 years. Soon our whirling hit counter will top 30.

Congratulations on a job well done, guys. We are definitely 'making a difference'.

A Study of Inconsistency

At first glance, the two biggest news items from this past week were totally unrelated. Of course, the biggest news reported the brutal slaughter of unarmed students and professors at Virginia Tech. The second was the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that dealt with the federal partial birth abortion ban.

In the first, everyone near a microphone or at a computer keyboard condemned the murders in Virginia. We, as a nation, were universally shocked, outraged, saddened, and empathetic with the grieving families and friends of those whose lives were taken needlessly.

The SCOTUS ruling, however, had its expected polarizing effect. The pro-choice crowd showed its derision of the ruling. There were innumerable comments of impending doom that mirrored that of Senator Hillary Clinton: "a dramatic departure from four decades of Supreme Court rulings that upheld a woman's right to choose."1 The Constitution is dead; the American experiment in freedom is over.

Here is an eye-witness description of the 'dramatic departure' for which these pro-choicers were wailing with loud lamentation:

In September, 1993, Brenda Pratt Shafer, a registered nurse with thirteen years or experience, was assigned by her nursing agency to an abortion clinic. Since Nurse Shafer considered herself "very pro-choice," she didn't think this assignment would be a problem. She was wrong. This is what Nurse Shafer saw:

" I stood at the doctor's side and watched him perform a partial-birth abortion on a woman who was six months pregnant. The baby's heartbeat was clearly visible on the ultrasound screen. The doctor delivered the baby's body and arms, everything but his little head. The baby's body was moving. His little fingers were clasping together. He was kicking his feet. The doctor took a pair of scissors and inserted them into the back of the baby's head, and the baby's arms jerked out in a flinch, a startle reaction, like a baby does when he thinks that he might fall. Then the doctor opened the scissors up. Then he stuck the high-powered suction tube into the hole and sucked the baby's brains out. Now the baby was completely limp. I never went back to the clinic. But I am still haunted by the face of that little boy. It was the most perfect, angelic face I have ever seen."2

Perhaps in his warped rationality, Cho Seung-hui was just following the logical next step; postpartum abortion. Seeing that, since Roe v. Wade in 1973, the definition of a 'person' worthy of life and protection was solely an arbitrary, judge/woman/physician-made choice, he appointed himself judge.

Both situations are unbelievably tragic. One is rightfully and universally condemned, the other, incredibly, has many defenders.

In the news

Headline: Asian tycoon leaves legacy to fortune-teller

Fortune-teller: "I never saw it coming!"

Hindsight

It is often said that hindsight is 20/20. Even in the VaTech tragedy there are those who, in hindsight, say that this could have be averted if the murderer has been helped in some way or institutionalized earlier, if the administration had locked down the school after the first two murders, if other students had been allowed to carry concealed handguns to defend themselves and others, or if there existed tighter gun control laws in the state of Virginia.

This is, like the wisdom of almost all hindsight, patent nonsense. It is just as likely that if any of those changes in history had been made, the murderer may have slain 100, escaped, and duplicated the incident on 10 other campuses throughout the country.

Humans, confusing themselves for God, regularly feel that they can manipulate the script like the director of a movie and bring to bear the ending that is more pleasing to them. Foolishly they do not see that their changes bring into play other unforeseen variables that result in an end far from the intended result and regularly much worse than that of the original.

So often is the case with political action. Legislators or judges whose vision within the greater scheme is only 'seeing through a glass darkly', attempt to play God and direct the 'movie' of human society. So many of their actions have resulted in disasters. Yet, in their blindness, they fail to learn and follow the adage, 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.'

Whether attributed to Ben Franklin or Albert Einstein, the following is more applicable: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."

So, in hindsight, I would say that the only way that this tragedy would have been averted would have been for someone to murder Cho Seung-Hui before his actions at the university. But then again, perhaps, 7 angry relatives or friends might have taken vengeance and slaughtered even more. I'm not God and therefore lacking in omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. If there were 9 of me on the U.S. Supreme Court, or 50 of me in the U.S. Senate, or 435 of me in the U.S. House of Representatives, or even 6 billion of me, my hindsight, as well as my ability to direct reality would be laughable.

Pitiful, just pitiful.

Hall of Honor

Oren Yaniv and Leo Standora, (NY)DAILY NEWS Staff Writers report:



Professor Liviu Librescu was killed as he blocked his classroom door to keep the gunman out as students escaped out the window. [...]

The Jerusalem Post states that Librescu, 76, was a holocaust survivor.

This hero's murder occurred on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

A Dream or Reality?

I think I had fallen asleep while the TV was on. In my 'dream' a 'woman' named Rosie claimed that the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech yesterday were not random acts of violence. She claimed that they were orchestrated by the Bush administration to cover up the government's role in 9/11. One or two of those murdered in Blacksburg had proof of the Bush conspiracy and had to be eliminated to continue the cover up. The others' deaths and injuries were only to further bury the information in the chaos and to give warning to any others who had information to 'keep their mouths shut'.

Summation by Steyn

In an essay concerning Don Imus, Mark Steyn sums up my own thoughts in one sentence:

It's a good rule of thumb in American scandals that, no matter how big an idiot someone is, the outrage over him will always be more idiotic.

I also appreciated the criticism of the Rutgers' response by a female correspondent on Powerline:

"Here are these tough women on top of the world and they are so fragile that a remark knocks them down. Hey, why wouldn't they have said 'F--- you? Who the heck is this fool Imus? We are queens of national basketball and there is no stopping us now. We can be and do anything we choose to be or do. . . . We don't need Al Sharpton to protect us. . . . ' But no, they look devastated and say they are damaged irreparably.''

[Steyn]Only in America: a team of champions who think they're victims, an old white fool who talks like a gangsta rapper and multi-millionaires grown rich on race-baiting who promote themselves as guardians of civility. Good thing there are no real problems to worry about.

Sharpton-Jackson Syndrome

Mary Grabar, whose posts are always excellent, writes 'Slave Masters of the Mind', on Townhall.com. Here is one excerpt:

Joy DeGruy Leary has copyrighted the title "Post-Traumatic Slave Disorder" on her web page and has capitalized on this disorder that she seems to have come up with by making presentations to governmental institutions and companies like the FBI, police bureaus, school districts, universities, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, and Nordstrom's. In an essay for a volume titled Should America Pay: Slavery and The [sic] Raging Debate on Reparations, Dr. Leary defines the syndrome: "PTSS theory states that African Americans sustained traumatic psychological and emotional injury as a direct result of slavery and continue to be injured by traumas caused by the larger society's policies of inequality, racism and oppression."

Grabar discussed George Washington Carver, an actual former slave, and his methods of teaching character in contrast to that of Joy DeGruy Leary's.

In an interesting sidenote, Grabar mentions that she is of Slavic ancestry, from whence we derived the term 'slave'.

That Buzzing Sound on Cellphone Reception

Geoffrey Lean and Harriet Shawcross report in The Independent, ' Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?':

It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail.

They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.

The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up. [...]

Do I sense another Al Gore movie in the works?

I'm selling cellphone offset credits at 96 cents per minute of usage in order to give tee bee of Guide to Midwest Culture 5 cents of every dollar to overcome this global problem.

(H.T. Dr. Sanity via Instapundit.)

The Separation of God from Culture

To listen to the portrayal of America in the modern press, both news and opinion; to view the Hollywood depiction of America, both historically and at present, is to be led toward the understanding that the United States is, and always has been, the epitome of evil in the world. George Bush is Hitler. American foreign policy is one of imperialism; of ill-treatment of other cultures that leads the rest of the world to naturally develop hatred and nurture terrorist cults. The United States attacks Sadaam to control his oil, but disregards the slaughter in Darfur because no benefit will be derived for Halliburton or ExxonMobil. Our lifestyles and policies are even credited with spearheading the destruction of the planet. America, the world's bully, seems to be despised as much at home as it is by al-Qaeda.

How could so many citizens, who are so lavishly nourished at the breast of America's luxury, mangle the fruitful nipple that feeds them with such ferocity? Countless speakers and writers are persuaded to account for this by reaction to deep-seated guilt. This guilt provides the impetus for the great number of irrational actions and charges.

In his book, The Politics of Guilt and Pity, Rousas Rushdoony addresses the presence of this guilt that well explains the incongruous activity that is spurred by today's American guilt. This book was first published in 1970.

The direction of American culture:

The human race, in apostasy from God, is deeply involved in a rebellious claim to autonomy and in the guilt which follows that claim. As a result of this omnipresent sense of guilt, there is an omnipresent demand for justification. The expression, "He's trying to justify himself," points to this demand by man for justification, and insistence on psychic or spiritual wholeness of health. A sense of guilt leaves a man feeling like a leaky, sinking ship: the energies must all be resolved to the repair of that breach. The psychology of the guilty man is this geared to self-defense, to spiritual survival, by means of an overcoming of the breach of guilt. The concern is a demand for salvation: the sinking ego wants to save itself, to find justification by making atonement for its guilt. [...]

A common recourse is to self-atonement and self-justification. A modern term for such behavior is masochism... self-punishment as atonement...

This masochism manifests in a variety of ways:

-Psychosomatic ailments; to suffer for sins
-Gambling; losing inevitable
-Alcoholism and drug use
-Burden-bearing; self-conscious public works of virtue, worry and fretting, worship or penance
-Injustice collecting; finding pleasure in displeasure, placing oneself in positions where he will be sure to feel offended
-Will to self and others' failure; individually as well as through political and economic views and activities calculated to fulfill the urge to mass destruction, factors which enter in include the craving for individual power and the motive for revenge. Victory through defeat.

A closely related activity is sadism, the transfer of guilt to an innocent party to reduce them to the same level of impotence and guilt. [...]

The reality of man apart from Christ is guilt and masochism. And guilt and masochism involve an unshakable inner slavery which governs the total life of the non-Christian. The politics of the anti-Christian will thus inescapably be the politics of guilt. In the politics of guilt, man is perpetually drained in his social energy and cultural activity by his over-riding sense of guilt and his masochistic activity. He will progressively demand of the state a redemptive role. What he cannot do personally, i.e., to save himself, he demands that the state do for him, so that the state, as man enlarged, becomes the human savior of man. The politics of guilt, therefore, is not directed as the Christian politics of liberty, to the creation of godly justice and order, but to the creation of a redeeming order, a saving state. Guilt must be projected, therefore, on all those who oppose this new order and age. [...]

...the caretaker state masks its tyrannical love under the name of 'social justice.'

The more a civilization advances, the deeper will its sense of sin become, because the increase of prosperity and cultural advantages will only increase the masochistic desire to pay for progress, which the individuals unconsciously believe requires atonement before enjoyment. As a result, the very liberating forces of civilization themselves call into existence the forces of enslavement. [...]

...Communism has used moral nihilism to prepare the way for passive political slavery: guilty men are more docile slaves.

...In the United States, as the nation has departed progressively from God, it has indulged progressively in a debunking of its history, in a general confession of many past faults, some often imagined. The hypocrisy of such confessions is striking: by confessing the sins of past generations, the present scholar or generation thereby implies its own superior virtues and it innocence of those sins. By the fact of such debunking or confession, it confesses also, very modestly, that wisdom is now born to us and is among us, so that confession again becomes a vehicle of pride. [...]

Again, Americans are repeatedly assured that American history is a long account of guilt, towards Indians, Negroes, minority groups, labor, Mexico, and, ultimately, all the world as well for refusing the to enter the League of Nations. This is defective history and perverse politics. Its purpose is the cultivation of guilt in order to produce a submissive populace.

More basically, the subtle indoctrination of humanistic scholarship infers that the Christian, and, in America, the Protestant in particular, is guilty because he is a Christian. The inference is that the Christian has no right to his identity; he must recognize all others and their rights, but he himself has none. The principles of the atheist must govern state and school; the wishes of all others have status before the law, and his have none. [...]

Wherever false responsibility is promoted, and ugly strategy of power is present. This strategy can be briefly summarized. First, make men feel guilty for all things and for everyone. Whatever happens on any continent or country is their responsibility and their burden. All the starving, needy, oppressed, and all the indigents, criminals, and diseased of the world are their burden, and they are guilty of evading their responsibilities if they do nothing about them.

Second, it is obvious that men cannot do much more than care for their own families. Therefore, ask them to exercise this imposed responsibility for the world by delegation, to delegate it to the state and the elite planners.

Third, by being given this world responsibility, the state and its elite planners become gods, governors of all things. They can now begin to remake the world in terms of their superior wisdom. God, after all, hardly had their superior and scientific intelligence.

Fourth, salvation has thus become the work of man. Man remakes man by statist law and action....

Rousas Rushdoony's description of 'the slippery slope' of humanism was written over 35 years ago, but it depicts so well the attitudes and cultural criticisms that we see happening today.

Kudos

Jemele Hill exhibits a lot of class in an apologetic article on ESPN.com: Page 2, 'Apology to Duke lacrosse players not enough':

I never wrote it, but I felt it -- which is just as bad. I said it in private discussions with friends, some of whom tried to get me to see the whole picture, not just the picture I wanted to see.

My being a black woman, my knowing too many athletes who treat women like items to be purchased in a vending machine, and my witnessing enough athlete rape trials where accusers are overwhelmed by their fame and fortune -- it all tainted my perception and made me doubt your innocence.

I feel stupid now.[...]

This is an excellent article. I laughed and got weepy. (A cinder must have gotten into my eye.)

(H.T. Daily Dollop.)

It's the Rutgers Women Who Must Apologize

The debacle that ensued over the Don Imus comments about the Rutgers Women's Basketball team that features the wit and wisdom of Al Sharpton has missed the point entirely. The truly offended parties have not been considered whatsoever.

All commenters consider that the Rutgers women were the innocent subjects of the abusive language of Imus. In reality, however, the Rutgers women proved to be the worst abusers, many displaying incredible hypocrisy.

In feigning offense at being labeled 'hos', the Rutgers women proved to be bigoted haters. This is, after all, 21st Century Post-Christian America. Prudish, Puritan moralisms belong only to the likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson. America is now enlightened almost as much as our European brothers.

In our new age, whores; promiscuous and immoral women, are pillars of our country. They are pioneers, exploring the universe of hard won freedoms from male oppression. Their lifestyles are now featured on nearly all television programming, popular music, and all movie screens. They are successfully used to advertise all varieties of products. They are the heroines of millions of young girls who try to emulate them in every way. They have consorted with Presidents such as JFK and Bill Clinton. Why would the Rutgers women want to distance themselves and discriminate against such an important segment of our society and again bind themselves in male dominated shackles?

The following conversation was overheard between two co-eds on campus:

"Whaddaya doin' after practice?"

"I gotta get back to the dorm to watch 'Desperate Housewives'."

"I luv that show. And I gots a tape of Dennis Rodman that teaches trash talkin' on the basketball court. Syracuse has a player who is part Indian. She's related to the Ho-Chunk tribe in Wisconsin."

"No, you di'unt!"

"After that we can go to the club. I hear that rapper Sting Key Dogg P is performing his new album tonight!"

"Yo, yo... he's super fly, dog, so talented that he's introducing a new genre of rap."

"Word up! He's mixing rap and country/western. What a genius. I axe ya, what's the album called?"

"I think it's titled "Slap Yo Knee Grow Hoedown."

"That's it! And maybe we can find some dudes and hook up."

"Yo, bee-utch, let's get widdit!"

The Rutgers women owe America's 'hos' an apology. C'mon, now, say it. We're sorry, Paris. We're sorry, Britney. We're sorry, Lindsay. We're sorry Mr. Cli'un. We're sorry we dissed y'all.

Guess you can't go, Steve

To the Olympics, I mean.

BEIJING (AP) -- Along with spitting, run-down housing and bad manners, add unintelligible English to the list of things organizers of the 2008 Beijing Olympics want to ban.

Seriously, can anybody understand anything Steve says?

Another reason for liberals to hate Leviticus

If I can do this without delving into the specific implications of any one Bible verse or the differences between Old and New Testaments, Judaism and Christianity, I give you this Michael Medved column:

Leviticus 19:15 declares: "You shall not commit a perversion of justice: you shall not favor the poor and you shall not honor the great, with righteousness shall you judge your fellow."

...

...the outlook of the left insists upon favoring the poor and the unfortunate—and thereby injecting unfairness and discrimination into the very core of politics and government. Favoring the poor, like favoring the rich, brings unequal treatment based on status, not actions. Justice requires rewarding good behavior, no matter its source, and discouraging and punishing bad actions, no matter who performs them.

Yes, I know, you already posted this, Steve. But it wasn't fair because I couldn't get into Blogger last night.

Yeeee-Haw!

Jason Apuzzo reviews the new film, The Reaping on LIBERTAS, a forum for conservative thought on film.

Here are some selected portions of his review:

The Reaping is about a small Southern town hit by 10 Biblical plagues brought on by a supposed Satan worshiper.[...]

As two dozen white Southern Christian bigots drove off in their shotgun filled pick-up trucks to kill an innocent child due to their white Southern Christian bigoted need to kill all things they don’t understand, one of them actually yelled, “Yee-Haw!”

I lived in the south for ten years. I’ve seen white Southern Christian bigots grab their shotguns and jump in pick-up trucks to kill something they didn’t understand. But no one ever yelled “Yee-Haw.”[...]

The favorite Director Scare is the screeching cat jumping out of nowhere. Cats don’t screech and jump. They may jump. They may screech. But they never jump and screech.

I grew up with cats, and never once did one jump and screech. And if one had I would’ve grabbed a shotgun and jumped in a pick-up truck to kill it.[...]

In the end, The Reaping is good for nothing more than yet another insight into how elite Hollywood views the South and religion. To them the South is filled with scary, pious, hypocritical fanatics, who are both unsophisticated and dumb. And naturally, religion has turned them ugly and worse. It’s okay for the Black Guy to be religious. For some reason Christianity isn’t threatening to Hollywood when the Christian is black. Maybe they find it cute and quaint.

Hollywood treats no other culture in the world as poorly and with such contempt as they do the Southern Christian. And yet, they probably don’t even see their own bigotry. They just believe that what they portray is fact. Of course, that’s the worst kind of prejudice. The most dangerous. The most ignorant.

Yeah! We Northern White Christians are just as scary, pious, hypocritical & fantatical, unsophisticated, and dumb. When do we get our due?

Say What?

Checking e-mails this morning, I noticed the following subject line on a mailing from Huggies(R) Baby Network:

"Great ideas with our interactive pregnancy tools"

Keep your interactive pregnancy tool in your drawers, please.

Interesting Read

Yaacov Ben Moshe posts a long essay on Breath of the Beast titled 'The Emergence of the Agélaste Left'.

Here are a couple of excerpts:

[...]The moderate and progressive left for all its claims of good intentions and intellectual righteousness has for some time been slipping into a form of totalitarian fundamentalism. The totalitarian progressive left is, I fear an, as yet, undiagnosed epidemic among the upper middle class and the academic and political elites of Western Civilization. As with most epidemics, it has been hard to define in its early stages. In recent years however, it has begun to manifest itself in ways that are impossible to ignore.[...]

The modern Progressive, leftist and liberal movements lack any real humor. What passes for humor in those precincts is actually more accurately classified as ridicule and mockery. While driving the other day I saw an excellent example, bumper stickers that read, “So Many Right-Wing Christians So Few Lions”.[...]

Faster Than a Speeding Bullet

As I was out snowblowing my driveway and sidewalk this morning an SUV stopped at the curb in front of me. The driver powered the passenger side window down to tell me that he was selling carbon offsets to save the planet from the global warming that I was causing. And since the carbon dioxide belching snowblower I was using was a Toro brand and 'toro' is 'bull' in Spanish, I had to buy greater credits for espousing the increase in bovine flatulence methane, a greenhouse gas. As I reached inside of my parka and fumbled for my Ruger 9mm I realized that I hadn't known the 0-60 mph pickup that those Janesville built Yukon XL Denalis had.

I gotta get me one of those.

Has Lucy Pulled Away the Football Again?

Michael Medved posts an article titled 'Biblical Liberation from Liberalism' on Townhall.com based on a verse from Leviticus.

"You shall not commit a perversion of justice: you shall not favor the poor and you shall not honor the great, with righteousness shall you judge your fellow." (Leviticus 19:15)

The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly

I recently finished reading two books by Bruce Bawer. The first is titled While Europe Slept- How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within. Bawer, from New York, moved to Europe in the late 90's.

"In the Netherlands, where political dicourse had moved beyond 'culture war' platitudes, I felt light-years removed from the foolishness of fundamentalism. There, for the first time, I allowed myself to feel the rage that had built up inside me. Yes, I loved my country, but I also realized that I wanted to be away from it-away from the idiocy, the intolerance, the puritanism. More and more I felt that I belonged in Europe." (p. 10)

After years of immersion in the European culture in several EU nations, Bawer came to realize that behind the outward 'high culture' there lurked a denial of the realities of the present situation.

"The main reason I'd been glad to leave America was Protestant fundamentalism. But Europe, I eventually say, was falling prey to an even more alarming fundamentalism whose leaders made their American Protestant counterparts look like amateurs. Falwell was an unsavory creep, but he didn't issue fatwas. James Dobson's parenting advice was appalling, but he wasn't telling people to murder their daughters. American liberals had been fighting the Religious Right for decades; Western Europeans had yet to even acknowledge that they had a Religious Right. How could they ignore it? Certainly as a gay man, I couldn't close my eyes to this grim reality. Pat Robertson just wanted to deny me marriage; the imams wanted to drop a wall on me. I wasn't fond of the hypocritical conservative-Christian line about hating the sin and loving the sinner, but it was preferable to the forthright fundamentalist Muslim view that homosexuals merited death." (p. 33)

He asks a question that summarized the situation:

"In a war between people who had rock solid beliefs and people who are capable of nuancing away pure evil, who has the advantage?" (p. 161)

I tend to think that the U.S. has slipped closer to the European political/cultural situation than Bawer seems to. The American 'brilliant elite' strives ever to catch up to their European counterparts begging for similar results.

While Europe Slept is an excellent piece of work and I highly recommend it.

The second Bruce Bawer book that I picked up was Stealing Jesus- How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity. Owing to the respect that was earned through While Europe Slept, I wanted to understand Bawer's analysis on Christianity in America.

Bawer's observations on selected portions of Christians' activity in the U.S. were well taken. We often do act in hypocritical ways. However, Bruce's views on what Christianity actually means is based only on finely selected Scriptures. He deletes the whole Old Testament, Revelation, most of Paul's epistles, and ignores most of the writings of the Gospels.

In effect, Bawer creates a Christian doctrine similar to the elitist/multicultural/diversity doctrine of the European culture that he fisks so well in While Europe Slept. In other words he creates a Christianity from his own feeling and emotion just as the European elite have done while ignoring the truth within their own culture.

Don't waste your time on Stealing Jesus.

Kids Can Be So Cruel

(Stolen from Tigerhawk.)

Surber Quick Hit

Don Surber: "Lead headline in the morning newspaper: “Cleric urges Iraq to unite against U.S.” He shot up to No. 4 in the Democratic presidential poll."1

I'll have to Google that. It may be true.

Jes' Fer Fun

Flap Over Imus Comments

Citing from a Townhall.com news article concerning Don Imus' comments on the contrasting appearances of the Rutgers Women's basketball team and that of the Tennessee Volunteers:

Unimpressed by his on-air apology or corporate promises of a tighter leash, angry critics of nationally syndicated radio host Don Imus called Saturday for his dismissal over his racially charged comments about the mostly black Rutgers women's basketball team.

"I accept his apology, just as I want his bosses to accept his resignation," said the Rev. Al Sharpton. He promised to picket Imus' New York radio home, WFAN-AM, unless the veteran of nearly 40 years of anything-goes broadcasting is gone within a week.


Nationally syndicated radio personality Don Imus speaks at the Radio and Television Correspondents Association dinner in Washington in this file photo of March 21, 1996. Imus apologized Friday, April 6, 2007, for making racially charged comments about the Rutgers University women's basketball team after the National Association of Black Journalists called for his immediate firing. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

Sharpton was not alone in his anger over Imus' description of the Rutgers' women as "nappy headed hos" during a Wednesday morning segment of his show, which airs for millions of listeners on more than 70 stations and the MSNBC television network.

I can't help but think that Sharpton is still stinging from the Joe Biden comments on Barack Obama as articulate and clean. Likewise, on his radio show, Imus did compliment the contrasting classy appearance of the Tennessee players. By implication, therefore, Biden called Sharton a 'nappy headed ho'. Al just can't catch a break.

Kekes Critiques...

Libertarianism:

Lovers of liberty live in this society, must be aware of the facts I have cited, and care about our future. How, then, could they not be alarmed by these facts? They a