Old World Swine

Paper Work

Please excuse Tim from real blogging, today. He has been peeling wallpaper and is complaining of tiredness and muscle aches. He will try to do make-up work over the weekend.

Sincerely,

Mrs. Jones

Everything Old is Nuclear Again

Vintage Tom Lehrer (please note the last verse, which I found configured exactly that way on the site where I found the lyrics. An accident, but pretty creepy for a song about The Bomb). This goes out to Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad;

WHO'S NEXT?

First we got the bomb, and that was good,
'Cause we love peace and motherhood.
Then Russia got the bomb, but that's okay,
'Cause the balance of power's maintained that way.
Who's next?

France got the bomb, but don't you grieve,
'Cause they're on our side (I believe).
China got the bomb, but have no fears,
They can't wipe us out for at least five years.
Who's next?

Then Indonesia claimed that they
Were gonna get one any day.
South Africa wants two, that's right:
One for the black and one for the white.
Who's next?

Egypt's gonna get one too,
Just to use on you know who.
So Israel's getting tense.
Wants one in self defense.
"The Lord's our shepherd"; says the psalm,
But just in case, we better get a bomb.
Who's next?

Luxembourg is next to go,
And (who knows?) maybe Monaco.
We'll try to stay serene and calm
When Alabama gets the bomb.
Who's next?
Who's next?
Who's next?
Who's next?

Some Clarification (I Hope)

Reader Johanna objects to my post about Carrie Prejean and the Miss USA pageant;

With all due respect Mr. Jones, I'm pretty surprised at your response here.

On the one hand, I would have to say I heartily agree with your view on the "lionizing" aspect of the conservative response -- it adds an unnerving tinge of absurdity to the situation.

On the other hand, I find some of what you say here to be incredibly judgmental and pretty unkind.

Speaking from experience, those of us who don't have any kind of platform with which to speak from are usually just drowned-out by the "progressive" voice. But this Miss California had the stage, and even if she wasn't very eloquent or very forceful, she said what she thought, probably knowing she would lose the competition she must have put a great deal of effort into. Usually I wouldn't be so eager to defend something I find so inane as the Miss USA pageant, but as another young woman bombarded with similar situations, I admire her gumption.

Let God judge whether or not she gave it her best. We all fall short. (And it could just be that God had another purpose altogether for this situation -- the press she's gotten spreads the word of the obviously bias judging -- EVEN as she made it clear this was her personal opinion.)

Thanks for visiting and for your comments, Johanna.

I am not saying that Carrie Prejean DIDN"T give it her best. I am pleased that she stood her ground to the extent she did. I just don't think that what she actually said justifies her being packaged as a cultural hero or dauntless champion of family values.

I think the real story is that now, in our current state of societal decay, one puts one's reputation and livelihood in jeopardy by making even the most timid suggestion that real, traditional marriage might be superior to gay couplings.

Even Miss Prejean's carefully qualified, uneasy and apologetic statement -  presented as only her personal opinion - drove the pro-sodomy crowd into a fury.

First they said they wanted tolerance for their point of view. Now they insist on no tolerance for any other point of view.

That didn't take long, either.

What About Blob?

(photo - space.com)

This story is just cool all around. The thing to remember is that, when we look into deep space, we are always looking back in time. The farther away the object, the farther back in time we are seeing.

The object in this story (of a class of objects known as "Lyman-Alpha blobs") is estimated to be about 12.9 billion light years away. Multiply that times 6 trillion and you have the distance in miles.

Scientists don't know much about the blob (dubbed "Himiko"), but are very keen to find out, as it is thought to be by far the oldest astronomical object yet encountered and could provide all kinds of information about the early universe... because it IS the early universe.

Isn't the time/space continuum weird?

I Prefer Chocolate... I Think

"We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite. And you know what, I think in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that's how I was raised." (FOX News)

This is the tepid and tentative endorsement of traditional marriage that, on the one hand, cost Carrie Prejean (Miss California USA and Miss USA finalist) the Miss USA crown, and that on the other hand has caused her to be lionized in the conservative press... neither of which makes any sense, based on what she actually said. Presidential candidate Barack Obama said essentially the same thing months ago.

This throws some light on the whole gay agenda and on politics in general here in the U.S..

Carrie Prejean will be known henceforth in the public mind as "the girl who would have been Miss USA", but for the presence of a flaming gay activist judge, and the girl who actually won the competition (does anyone know her name?) will be forever known as "the girl who beat Carrie Prejean".

The gay judge, Perez Hilton, got his thong in a twist because he wanted to hear Miss Prejean say, "Golly, I think chocolate and vanilla are both just swell..." and she had the audacity to say "I think... I prefer chocolate. No offense to vanilla people.".

As Mark Shea has observed time and again, where the gay agenda is concerned "Tolerance Is Not Enough! You Must Approve!". The message (and this episode is only its latest incarnation) is very clear: "You want to make it in the entertainment business? Then..." - I was going to say, "learn to keep your mouth shut", but the real lesson is - "learn to parrot the opinions we give you - with enthusiasm - or else".

That's nothing new, it's just acquired the brashness that is the hallmak of a bully who has grown accustomed to success. Their fear campaign has worked, in large measure. "Agree with us, publicly, if you want to work. Disagree and you will be passed over". It used to be that aspiring entertainers were passed over in private meetings... now they are passed over publicly, clapped in irons and pelted with fruit. Pelted by fruits, you might say. What's troubling is that the same thing is happening in corporate offices and boardrooms. Learn to say the right thing, if you value your job.

But then, in the hinterlands of the right, you have Fox News throwing Miss Prejean a virtual ticker tape parade, treating her as if she had said, "Mr. Perez Hilton, tear down this wall!!!", ignoring the fact that her answer was in fact very meekly pro-marriage, and lacked any moral conviction, that she took pains to emphasize that this was just her opinion... that she is, in regard to gay marriage, "personally opposed, but..."

I know she's young, and that she's no philosopher, and that she was on the spot and under a great deal of pressure, and I suppose I should be happy she was able to stammer her way through any kind of half-hearted endorsement of real marriage at all... but it's not as if she didn't know the question might come up. The contestants do see them in advance (though they don't know which one they may be asked).

I'm appalled that she was set up, basically, by a gossip Queen who (wrapping himself in the PFLAG) was determined to deny the Miss USA title to anyone not solidly toeing the line of the gay agenda, but I'm also appalled at the reaction to her speech at both ends of the political spectrum.

Blogging is *SO* 2005...

Eric Scheske at The Daily Eudemon posts on the Evil of Twitter and notes;

It suddenly dawned on me: “Holy Brevity! Blogs have become the new literary periodical genre!” Just five years ago, blogs were attacked for their superficial literary quality. It now looks like they’re getting too heavy for the average young reader. Heck, at this rate, literature will devolve into smoke signals and grunts. We’ll go back to caveman communication, but without the ability to draw.

I dropped this in his combox;

I have a Twitter account, but I very rarely use it, for all the reasons you mention.

I recently observed to a friend that to the LOL generation, blogging is considered a more serious, staid and respectable form of communication because its practitioners make use of archaic things like capital letters, punctuation and paragraph breaks.

Okay, I made the comment on Facebook… but my point stands.

Undoubtedly, I have not made full use of Twitter, or Facebook, or even this blog, in terms of marketing myself. I started this blog for fun, to keep a kind of loose journal and because scrapbooking strikes me as really gay.

I do feel like I need to more effectively promote my daily painting blog, though, so I had better get on that.

House Boy

I've been doing a lot of home improvement stuff, lately, in preparation for (God willing) selling our house and buying another, and I've discovered that I really enjoy this kind of work, though it has required me to awaken muscle groups that had been happily asleep, and boy are they grumpy. It is extremely fulfilling work, though... I can compare it to those days long ago when I lived with my folks on a small lake in Lawrence County, Arkansas, where we had a good sized garden.

That is, my folks had a good sized garden. If it had been up to us kids, the ground would have remained blissfully undisturbed, the red clay baking into something like a concrete slab during the summer months and, in the rainy season, turning into a slurry of sticky, red gumbo.

But my folks (especially my Dad) took pains not only to break the ground, but to fold into it all manner of loamy, organic refuse... sawdust from a local sawmill, moldy hay, horse manure... all of which I and my brother had the privilege of hauling and shoveling.

Then came hours of walking behind a roto-tiller, and finally planting, watering, weeding, hoeing... how I loathed it all. I grumbled and fumed and thought about all the productive hanging-out time I was missing. I had just bought Steely Dan's new album, Aja, and I had plans to spend precious hours laying in bed with my headphones on. How did they not get that?

And yet, at the end of a day of gardening, even for me (too cool to enjoy gardening) there was a deep and undeniable satisfaction in looking back at the tilled earth, the planted rows, the green and growing things. Then there were the meals we made off that little patch of ground... new potatoes, fresh green beans, sweet peas, asparagus, corn on the cob, tomatoes, peppers... Even for a classy sophisticate like me (you must read that last line in Jethro Bodine's voice) it was pretty heavenly stuff. It was't just the fact that it tasted great, either... it was this idea of living off our own land and the work of our hands.

Hunger is the best spice, as they say, and coming in from a day of garden work to a plate of something picked an hour ago and cooked five minutes ago is one of the best things there is.

I find fixing up our house deeply gratifying in the same way. It's one of those things that humans were made to do, and from which we seem made to draw satisfaction. Allow me to wildly speculate that if we all spent more time gardening and fixing up our homes instead of watching TV or surfing the web, we would be immeasurably happier and better off.

Home improvement is fast becoming a new hobby for me, rather than merely another chore. I can hardly wait to get started on our new place (wherever that will be).

Excuse me, I have wallpaper to peel.

Energy Secretary Chu: "Run in Circles! Scream and Shout!"

Now, aren't you glad that the Obama administration is taking politics out of science? That's what enables his energy secretary, Steven Chu (nicknamed "Big League" by Obama) to make sober and coldly rational assessments like this;

"Lots of area in Florida will go under. New Orleans at three-meter height is in great peril. If you look at, you know, the Bay Area, where I came from, all three airports would be under water. So this is -- this is serious stuff. The impacts could be enormous,"

So, everyone, run out and buy an electric car right now! Form a drumming circle and ceremonially break all your conventional light bulbs and replace them with fluorescents! Drink your own bathwater! Most importantly, though, be sure not to do anything reckless and irresponsible like having children, because they will suck up resources that could be better spent on spotted owls and snail darters and such.

Now, it's true that none of these actions will impact global warming at all, but they will make you feel better - will give you a vague sense of having contributed to something - and anyway, that's the way the herd is going. Polls show that people are concerned about recent polling on attitudes toward global warming. The voters have spoken!... and as we know, democracy is never wrong... just look at Palestine, and the Weimar Republic... and lemmings (an example from nature, which is also never wrong).

Unfortunately, while Crock o' Bama and his sycophantic minions cabinet valiantly attempt to keep reason science and politics in completely separate, hermetically sealed envelopes, there are still divisive and radical voices trying to ruin everything;

"Secretary Chu still seems to believe that computer model predictions decades or 100 years from now are some sort of 'evidence' of a looming climate catastrophe, said Marc Morano, executive editor of ClimateDepot.com and former top aide to global warming critic Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla. 

"Secretary Chu's assertions on sea level rise and hurricanes are quite simply being proven wrong by the latest climate data. As the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute reported in December 12, 2008: There is 'no evidence for accelerated sea-level rise.'"

Morano said hurricane activity levels in both hemispheres of the globe are at 30 years lows and hurricane experts like MIT's Kerry Emanuel and Tom Knutson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration  "are now backing off their previous dire predictions."

He said Chu is out of date on the science and is promoting unverified and alarming predictions that have already been proven contrary.

Pope Benedict XVI is 82 Today

Thanks for the tip, Sean!

Papa Ratzi sez; "Das Leben ist gut!"

Life is Good. That's God's opinion, and - in a nutshell - that's what the Church has been trying to get across for 2000 years.

Guns & Violence & Stuff

As happens sometimes, the blog planets have aligned and produced a synchronicity of images and thoughts related to violence and guns, with results both sobering and hilarious.

First, Sean at The Blue Boar demonstrates how he teaches his children to recycle, by turning ordinary road kill into *Art*...

Then, Mark Shea posts this picture of (as the Reese's  people might say) "two great things that go great together"... if a high-powered assault rifle is good, a high-powered assault rifle with bacon must be better. Everything's better with bacon. It's basic logic.

And finally, Jimmy Akin posts this graph on American attitudes toward gun control...

The combox is always interesting at Jimmy's, and this one is no exception.

The opinions cover the whole spectrum, from "guns are horrible and dangerous and don't help anyone" to "guns are great and make everyone safer". My two cents consisted of;

One may legitimately refuse to use one's right of self defense - that is a personal choice - but one may still have a responsibility to protect other innocent people, which is why policemen carry guns.

It's one thing to be a pacifist in terms of my own personal safety, but it's another thing to refuse to intervene on behalf of someone else. The latter could be seen as cowardice, as I may in one situation or another have a positive moral DUTY to intervene.

This doesn't touch directly on gun ownership, but is just looking at the whole idea of the legitimate use of physical force.

I think we in the U.S. should adopt the Swiss model... every citizen ought to serve a mandatory stint in the armed services, and at discharge be sent home with their weapon and a crate of ammunition, which they must keep and maintain in good working order (verified by an annual inspection).

In response to one poster who saw non-violence advocates as part of the "feminizing" of the Church, I wrote;

I think there is room in the Church for those with a charism of non-violence, and for those who are moved to protect the innocent through acts of physical resistance and heroism.

We should not be trying to make those choices for one another, so condemnation from either side is unhelpful. I must say, I think men clearly have a natural law duty to physically protect the innocent to a much greater degree than do women. It may be natural, then, for more women to find guns or physical violence in general distasteful and upsetting. Certainly not all women feel that way... Sarah Palin, for instance, or my own mom (who used to handle a 9mm pistol pretty well), or St. Joan of Arc.

I haven't owned a gun in a long time, probably because we decided a long time ago to live in a part of the country with a very low crime rate... a semi-rural area where traditional values are still pretty strong, and where gun ownership is common. I very rarely feel the need to lock my car, or even remove the keys.

Given what I know about my kids, and my perception of the level of need for that kind of protection, I just never thought having a gun in the house was necessary. Now that my kids are older and more mature, though, I'm thinking of getting a couple of guns and teaching them to shoot, as it is a skill I'd like them to have before they leave the nest... whether they ever need it or not.