"Woo-hoo. Woo-haa."

In case you aren't going out to a New Year's Eve party, here's how to make your own fun at home.

How to save the world

David Warren sums it up.

Yet if the 20th century proved anything, it was that insoluble problems cannot be solved. The grandest essays in state control each ended in collapse; and our patient efforts to create welfare states through the Fabian means of representative democracy have ended in bankruptcy. The project of bureaucratic socialism, in its many different forms, has a failure rate of 100 per cent, and the very aspiration needs to be abandoned.



But what to replace it with? Faith.

[...] It is in our nature, when we see a man fallen, to help him up. It is not in our nature to wait for the government to arrive. Therefore stop waiting, and live.

From Whom All Good Things Come

Binks holds forth on How the Christians Stole Christmas.

h/t Deborah Gyapong

"...freedom from whatever weighs us down..."

The Pope's Christmas message.

Nat is King!

Coming down to the final stretch, it looks like he's going to win the Christmas Crooner poll hands down. Here's one reason why.

Merry Christmas, DOH readers! Look to see me no more!

Why Waffles?

Why did they chose waffles? A waffle doesn't have the same number of legs as there are wins required for a Stanley Cup. (Although with the size of today's league, the number of playoff games the champs end up playing may be equal to the number of dimples on both sides of a toaster waffle.) When your team loses ten games in a row, they don't call it a waffle-trick. (Although when they do start that, I want full credit.) It's not even as though waffles was a Toronto favorite who had an acrimonious parting with Leaf fans and was making its first appearance with its new team. (Although maybe it would help the Leafs to replace some of their players with frozen breakfast foods.)

I know this isn't a very Christmas-like post, but as Mr. Beazly said, if I wanted to find the answer, I had to strike while the (waffle) iron was hot!

Nutrition not required, thank you.

Mr. Pinkerton, having just come in from the cold, was wondering how to make a hot toddy. I'd always though it was just rum, hot water and sugar, but I decided to google it to find some 'real' recipes. I got 90,000 hits. And there is probably a different recipe on each site. I thought this one, from Chatelaine, was fairly typical:

3 tbsp ( 1.5 oz/45 mL) brandy

1 tsp ( 5 mL) granulated sugar
2 (up to 3) cloves
1 lemon slice
3/4 cup ( 175 mL) boiling water


And fairly funny. The recipe included this line:

Sorry, there is no nutrition information available for this recipe.


As if anyone looking to drink a hot toddy is concerned about what vitamins they might be ingesting. Calories, maybe, but I've found it rather curious that they are never posted on liquor bottles. I wonder why.

December 23rd: O Emmanuel

 

 

O Emmanuel, Rex et legifer noster, exspectatio Gentium, et Salvator earum: veni ad salvandum nos, Domine, Deus noster.

O Emmanuel, our King and our Lawgiver, the anointed of the nations, and their Saviour: Come and save us O Lord, our God.

DOH is inclusive

We will post pictures of other people's baking, not just our own. Some lovely Christmas sugar cookies, courtesy of avid DOH reader Mrs. Jones:

Just because I was thinking about this song today.

December 22nd: O Rex Gentium

 

 

O Rex Gentium, et desideratus earum, lapisque angularis, qui facis utraque unum: veni, et salva hominem, quem de limo formasti.

O King of the nations, the ruler they long for, the cornerstone uniting all people: Come, and save us all, whom you formed out of clay.

12 Days of Winter

Again, h/t to SDA. This one was worth posting. Too funny.

"Cuts, cuts, cuts, and more cuts."

Lefty, hippie, everything-for-nothing, nanny-statism approaches its day of reckoning. Not an easy video to watch, because you know that this is just the beginning, and that Canada will not be immune. CBS (60 Minutes) video on the looming financial meltdown in various U. S. state and municipal governments.

"The problem is," say Wall Street wizards, "that no one knows how deep the [debt crisis] holes are." Comforting. Borrow like there's no tomorrow, but tomorrow is now here. Riot, scream and smash if you want to, but it won't change a thing.

CBS video money quote: "There are no guarantees that Washington will ride to the rescue." Is he serious? 'Washington' is flat broke and trillions in debt too! In fact the economy of the entire western world is collapsing. (Wonder if that had anything to do with abandoning God and embracing the Culture of Death? Naaaa...)

Government has spent too much for too long on unsustainable programs (thanks, Baby Boomers, and the culture of entitlement you spawned!). The monster is finally awakening and (sadly) most ordinary people who have scraped and saved diligently for their children's future and their own retirement will be swallowed whole. Buy land and learn how to grow potatoes and butcher chickens. And chop wood and make soap, and weave and...


h/t SDA (Yes, I was too lazy to embed the vid myself. I'm on holiday.)

P.S. Unions are evil.  

December 21st: O Oriens

 

O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae, et sol justitiae: veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

O Day-Spring, splendour of light everlasting: Come and enlighten those who sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death.

December 20th: O Clavis David

 

 

O Clavis David, et sceptrum domus Israel; qui aperis, et nemo claudit; claudis, et nemo aperit: veni, et educ vinctum de domo carceris, sedentem in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

O Key of David, and Sceptre of the house of Israel:  who opens and no one closes, who closes and no one opens:  Come, and deliver from the chains of prison whoever sits in the darkness and the shadow of death.

Our Schools are George Costanza

Teach 8th graders about sex techniques? Sure! Ask your 12 year old if he's queer? Sounds great! Discuss the size of other people's reproductive organs? It'll be on the quiz! Mimic sex acts in front of the student body? No child left behind! Then, when parents question what is being taught to their children, the school/teacher/ educational bureaucrat asks, in phony befuddlement, "Was that wrong? Should I not have done that? Gee, if I'd had any idea that kind of behavior was frowned upon...."

As I recall, George's purpose, in this particular Seinfeld episode, was to get fired from his job. What is the purpose of Canada's schools? I wonder if this is how they envision themselves as a "counterweight" to the values which families and religious communities instill.

Here's to you, Jim Caviezel!

Not only for talking the talk, but for walking the walk.

"…we all have this desire to want to be liked…but what we should be asking God is the desire for humility."

God bless him.

"All dye."

For Lego lovers everywhere, here is my favorite work by our family's stop-motion Spielberg. (In the true spirit of Hollywood style creativity, it's a remake of "The Final Fight".) If you are exhausted from shopping for Lego, relax and enjoy!

McDonald's Lawsuit revisited

Decided to post about it on Mercator Net's Family Edge blog.

In short, we live in a society where kids are exposed to the worst violence on TV and in video games; vapid sitcoms that defy good taste and undermine parental authority; soft (and not-so-soft) porn on TV, billboards and magazine covers in the grocery checkout. Indeed, minors can obtain contraceptives and even abortions without parental knowledge (never mind consent). And yet there are folks out there crusading against toys in Happy Meals. I find this not just exasperating, but ludicrous.

Sorry for my cynicism, but it sounds as though Ms Parham is asking, not that her children be protected from McDonald’s advertising (she could manage that herself), but that she be protected from her children’s wheedling.

December 19th: O Radix Jesse

O Radix Jesse, qui stas in signum populorum, super quem continebunt reges os suum, quem Gentes deprecabuntur: veni ad liberandum nos, jam noli tardare.

O Root of Jesse, standing fast an ensign before the peoples, before whom all kings are mute, to whom the nations will do homage: Come quickly to deliver us.

At least he still loves Christmas.

Mark Shea writes about one of those "Human toothaches/Napoleon Dynamites with a mean streak".

Maybe someday Mr. Marazzani will realize that it's really impossible for Christianity to "hijack" anything that is good, beautiful and true - it already belongs to God. You can no more enjoy what is good about Christmas and "give Jesus back" than you can enjoy the sun's rays while rejecting the light. Christ is your light, whether you open your eyes to Him or not.

Why I am content to be a non-funded home schooler.

Deborah Gyapong links to a disturbing National Post article concerning Quebec's ban on religious instruction in schools. I agree, this is the money quote:

“Religious communities and families hold sway over children through the household and through churches, mosques and synagogues,” he said. “I don’t see it as a problem for daycares and schools to be, in a way, a kind of counterweight to the hold that religious communities and families have over their children.”

Darn those families, "holding sway" over their own children! You can almost see the zombie that is the one-size-fits-all, everything is relative, tolerate-everything-but-Christianity, state education system drooling over a share of those innocent young brains.  Look out for that "counterweight" - it has a way of crashing down pretty hard when "religious communities and families" are cut out of the equation.

Animal Rights Kooks vs. a Trudeau

Whose side should the CBC take in this one? Maybe the poll is to help them decide.

I can hear heads exploding now.

What a super awesome idea!!

Study recommends free booze for homeless alcoholics.

"It's kind of saving money. I know people think this is crazy, spending taxpayers money giving alcohol to this population, but we do it for methadone, for heroin addicts, why not for alcohol addicts?"

Let's not stop there - why don't we erect special stores where kleptomaniacs can steal stuff without the risk of getting chased into oncoming traffic? They would contain items already paid for with tax money, so it wouldn't cost anything! We could also provide free kiddie porn to pedophiles on a weekly basis - make it soft core, with digital images instead of pictures of real children, and there's no harm done. I'm also looking forward to the specially authorized fast food joints that will dole out McNuggets in carefully controlled quantities in order to keep gluttons from pigging out and giving themselves heart attacks. Maybe we could do something for smokers while we're at it. That's an addiction, too, and even though chain smoking doesn't generally result in disorderly conduct or arrest, you can't deny that it causes health problems down the road. Perhaps a pack of low-tar ciggies once a week would make everything better.

I think what we really need is a closed off, highly controlled, publicly funded place where researchers can go to get a weekly dose of feeling like they are doing something usefu- oh, wait, never mind.

Reason #4807217295738 to Love Don Cherry

Fast forward to the seven minute mark to see it.

December 18th: O Adonai

 

O Adonai, et Dux domus Israel, qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti, et ei in Sina legem dedisti: veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extento.

O Lord and Ruler of the house of Israel, who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush, and on mount Sinai gave him the Law:  Come, and with outstretched arm redeem us!

I'll Have a Blue Christmas

My earliest memories of Christmas are blue - our living room was blue, we had blue glass balls on our tree, and the light that shone through the hole in the back wall of our nativity set's stable was also blue. It seems to me the lights on the Christmas display at our church was blue, too. They had three trees set up at the front of the church and a big nativity set and I think all the lights were blue. It was so beautiful, and it is still the model I have in my head when I decorate my own home for Christmas.

DOH readers, if you have a Christmas memory you'd like to share, please chime in. If not, sit back and enjoy The Living Voices with "I'll Have a Blue Christmas".

Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow.

Small Dead Animals contributor "EBD" has posted a beauty for the Reader Tips thread - one of my favorite Christmas songs from one of my favorite Christmas movies:

"Christmas can be a difficult time for some people, a seasonal reminder of dearly loved ones now departed or of hard financial circumstances. In tonight's sweet but somewhat melancholy Christmas song, the singer, struggling to keep real-world trouble and loss at bay, consoles her younger sister with such promises as her heart can provide, and tries to reassure herself, too, that persevering kinship and love will rise to the spirit of the season and somehow hold the day. From the 1944 film Meet Me In St. Louis, here's Judy Garland's touching performance of Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas."

What a lovely description, not only of the song, but of the undertone of sweet sadness which accompanies a Christmas spent far removed from beloved people and places. I always dislike it when artists who cover this song sing the alternate lyrics, "Through the years we all will be together, if the fates allow/Hang a shining star upon the highest bough," because it seems to rob the song of its character. We all have those times we have to "muddle through", even as we experience the joy of Christmas. Indeed, Christmas leads to the foot of the Cross, but of course we know how that story ends. I take comfort in that when I think of all the people I won't see this Christmas, and a few I won't see again in this life - and how unexpectedly one can pass from the former category to the latter.

If this version of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" seems too sad to you, take a look at the original lyrics. I think the version made famous by MMISL hits just the right note. And here's an extra stocking stuffer: it's not a Christmas song, but definitely creates a mood similar to that of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas". "Boys and Girls Like You and Me" didn't make it into the final cut of the film.

As long as we're talking about evil foods...

We tried this killer recipe yesterday, and it's fabulous. I really don't want to know how much fat there is per serving, but you could always substitute plain yogurt for the mayo. I was pretty leery about combining milk and tomato sauce, but trust me, the end result is worth it. Ultimate comfort food.

Chili Crab

1 cup long grain rice, uncooked
1 cup sliced fresh mushrooms
1 medium green pepper, seeded and finely chopped (optional)
1/4 cup onion flakes (I used fresh onion instead)
1/2 lb crab meat (about 225 g)

2/3 cup salad dressing or mayonnaise
1 cup milk
7 1/2 ounces tomato sauce
2 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/8 tsp pepper

Combine first 5 ingredients in ungreased 2 quart (2 L) casserole. Stir to distribute evenly. Mix next 6 ingredients in bowl. Pour into casserole. Stir. Cover. Bake at 350 degrees F for 1 hour. Serves 4 to 6.

From Company's Coming: Fish and Seafood.

(Revelation: try substituting curry powder for the chili, or better yet, use both.)

UPDATE: Be still, my pounding heart! Just visited the CC website and the BREAD COOKBOOK IS BACK (By popular demand)..........Yay!

U.S. military: Tater Tots a national security threat

I guess that makes Napoleon Dynamite a terrorist...
(Case in point: his first name is that of a dictator and his last name is an explosive--and he's taken over the minds of our youngsters! His affinity for Tater Tots seals the deal.)

POTUS Obama to the rescue, with a 4.5 billion dollar Nutrition Bill.

Supporters say the law is needed to stem rising health care costs due to expanding American waistlines and to feed hungry children in tough economic times. Mrs. Obama cited a group of former generals and military officials who have said unhealthy school lunches are a national security threat because weight problems are now the leading medical reason that recruits are rejected.

McDonalds, it's your fault...

...if my child is fat. It's your fault that she watches TV and sees your commercials. It's your fault that she doesn't listen to me. Give me some money.

Mom to Sue McDonald's in Happy Meal Battle

Really.

Money quote:

"I object to the fact that McDonald's is getting into my kids' heads without my permission and actually changing what my kids want to eat," Parham said in a CSPI statement announcing the lawsuit.


Does that mean we can sue the public education system for inculcating tommyrot 'without our permission'? It may be worth a shot.

This certainly one-ups the flying nun

Nun accused of embezzling $850,000 from NY college

..to fund what? A peace 'n justice-seeking, universe-healing, zeal for the cosmos, solidarity with the marginalized initiative of some sort? Nope. Gambling in Atlantic City.

Story here.

But that's not the whole story, is it? Well, no. The sister in question certainly must have been a fuddy duddy pre Vatican II type who wore a habit and prayed the rosary daily? No? How did you guess! Her religious order, the Sisters of Saint Joseph, tend toward the dissenting side of the fence. Knock me down with an unconsecrated wafer.

Case in point: they supported Obama's pro-abort health care bill.

One reaction came through loud and clear from Archbishop Raymond L. Burke, formerly the Archbishop of St. Louis and now the head of Rome's Apostolic Signatura.  During remarks at Mundelein Seminary in Illinois earlier this month, the Archbishop said that Catholic consecrated religious who openly dissent from the authority of Rome and the Church's teachings on life are "an absurdity of the most tragic kind" and should cease from identifying themselves as Catholic. 

Note to gals who feel called to the consecrated life: it's probably best to avoid any order that calls itself "dynamic" but comprises almost entirely women in their 60s whose philosophies hail from that decade.

Going back to our Puritan roots

Public shaming, censorship and book burning... at left-lib universities. Do read the whole thing, especially before you decide where to send your children for post-secondary "education."

In being inculcated into the speech-code ethos, American students are increasingly having their thoughts controlled rather than their minds expanded. Far from being laboratories of learning, many campuses have become laboratories for new forms of censorship and conformism. Governing everything from political hotheadedness to sexist speech (one American university outlawed any speech which judged someone on the basis of their sex alone, until FIRE pointed out that this meant the university was effectively banning men’s and women’s toilets), colleges now communicate to students the message that they are not entering an institution of open-mindedness and free, sometimes robust debate, but rather one made up of fragile individuals who must be addressed in a polite, PC manner at all times.

Lukianoff tells me about one of the more extreme examples of the speech-code ethos, ‘probably the best and most nightmarish example of what we call “thought reform”’. The University of Delaware had a mandatory programme for all 7,000 of its students who lived in dorms, which it actually explicitly referred to as a ‘treatment’. The students were expected to attend floor meetings so that they could be told what was acceptable speech on campus and what was not, where the idea, says Lukianoff, ‘was effectively to cure them of any obvious racist, sexist or homophobic beliefs’.

[...]

I always like to put the Buddhist argument for freedom of speech’, says Lukianoff. ‘Buddhists believe life is pain and they have a point. You do someone a tremendous disservice if you teach them that pain in life is a distortion of life. Because as soon as you start seeing hurtful things as being aberrations rather than part of normal human existence, then you start to see robust debate and disagreement as a distortion of the human experience rather than a part of the human experience. When you have students graduating from college believing that it is really, really bad if they have their feelings hurt, you are crippling them, you are preventing them from being able to deal with everyday life and debate.’

h/t  Deborah Gyapong

Rude and potentially intolerant

I'm OK with that.

The inimitable David Warren:

It could of course be argued that pagan savages is a rude and potentially intolerant way to refer to the de-Christianized heirs of our Western civilization. We are aware that they can be quite touchy, and are generally disinclined to take what they give. We could fill this column with the terms they apply to religious believers.


Let me add that people touchy about themselves, but not about others, are called narcissists too, and in that very formula my reader may discern the link between narcissism and criminal behaviour.

Indeed, let me spell that out.


At the root of criminal behaviour, after we have lopped off all its branches and dug to its source, is indifference to the pain of others, contrasted with wilful indulgence of one's own pleasures.

[...]

Reason comes into this, too. At the root of reason is a certain patience in observing the connections between things. One does not, for instance, take out one's wrath on Prince Charles because the education secretary in a government he never elected has raised one's tuition fees. One does not even take it out on the education secretary, who is only doing his job in the face of massive public debt. Instead, one patiently reviews his arguments, to see if they can be confuted.


Unless, of course, one is a student in a university only in some nominal and superficial sense - mere accreditation. More deeply, one may be a ward of the state, already living on massive public subsidy; and beyond this, a person with criminal tendencies - a thug and a hooligan.

Which is precisely the problem we face on university campuses, not only in England; and increasingly in the streets, not only in London. We have a whole generation of what I characterized above as pagan savages, whose most plausible excuse is that they were raised by pagan savages in their turn. We have generations who have lived since early childhood almost exclusively for the sake of consumer gratification; who have no other God.

And it will be a royal pain to convert them; but I can see no other way forward.

How's that?

I was shopping last Saturday and saw a big sign that read:
Only 14 more shopping days until Christmas!
Which I thought was rather ironic and funny, in a sad kind of way. I mean, how does one define "shopping day" in a culture where some (many, actually) stores are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? The old "Only ____ more shopping days till Christmas" thing hearkens back to the caveman era when stores were closed on Sundays. My heart goes out to the poorly paid folk who have to work the 3:00 a.m. shift at Walmart.

Back from the dead

Well, not exactly. Our internet provider (satellite company) was down for two days. It's rather frightening when you realize how much you depend on the interweb.

The Catholic Church's biggest crisis is loss of faith, not abuse

So says Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin. Read about it on W. Australia's The Record.

Marguerite A. Peeters

If you have never heard of her, today is your lucky day. Brilliant.

The postmodern ethic of choice boasts of eliminating hierarchies. Yet by globally imposing the “transcendence” of the arbitrary choice, it engenders a new hierarchy of values. It places pleasure above love, health and well-being above the sacredness of life, the participation of special interests groups in governance above democratic representation, women’s rights above motherhood, the empowerment of the selfish individual above any form of legitimate authority, ethics above morality, the right to choose above the eternal law written in the human heart, democracy and humanism above divine revelation - in a nutshell, immanence above transcendence, man above God, the “world” above “heaven”. 

The new hierarchies express a form a domination over consciences - what pope Benedict XVI, prior to his election, called a dictatorship of relativism. The expression may seem paradoxical: dictatorship means that there is a top-down imposition, while relativism implies the denial of absolutes and reacts against anything it considers as “top-down”, such as truth, revelation, reality, morality. In a dictatorship of relativism, a radical deconstruction of our humanity and of our faith is somehow being imposed on us in “nonthreatening” ways - through cultural transformation. Relativism wears a mask: it is domineering and destructive.

As she correctly points out, even the church has bought into this crap. Oh, look at the time! Must get to Queen's House for my Holy Yoga session; then it's on to the Development and Peace rally against bottled water.

Children are sooooooooooo expensive!!!

--Not.

Ho hum. Yet ANOTHER article about the super-scary cost of raising kids has appeared in cyberspace. Read my response on Mercator Net's 'Family Edge' blog.

Chopper rescues Frenchwoman trapped in tree by wild pigs

Wasn't that a dream I had recently?

I don't know why I'm posting the the link to this story. The headline says it all.

Why Canada could not now help win a war, even if its existence depended on it

"Canadian military establishes dress rules for transsexuals." Life Site News

In 1998, Canadian Forces agreed to afford its soldiers sex-change operations, along with hormonal and psychiatric treatment, at a cost to Canadian taxpayers of between $20,000 and $40,000 per procedure.

Cuz, like, there aren't any more pressing issues right now in the Canadian military:

Scott Taylor, publisher of Esprit de Corps military magazine, told the National Post that most service members resent the “politically correct” policies of an “out of touch headquarters staff,” especially in light of the recent report by the military ombudsman that criticized the National Defence Department for curtailing support for veterans and the families of fallen soldiers.

“You couldn’t get much worse timing on that internally,” he said, commenting on the release of the transsexual dress code document on the heels of the ombudsman’s report. “It’s so removed from what the guys are facing over in Afghanistan ... That doesn’t really relate to dress codes of the transgendered.”

latest post at Mercator Net

On what to buy Grandma for Christmas. As sole commentor Janet pointed out, the idea might be flawed in that most Grandmas don't like technology (because they have no idea how to operate it). Isn't that the truth. A great number of us who are not yet grandmas don't like technology either.

We still love them

Even though... well, that Grey Cup thing and all. I'm embarrassed to say how long we stood in line the other day at the local mall in order to get some Rider autographs, but it was worth it. The Misses Pinkerton were thrilled (and I think Mr. Pinkterton enjoyed himself too). Here the gals are with Rider QB Darian Durant. We were sorry that the eldest Miss Pinkerton was unable to join us. Study hard, Miss. P-- Christmas vacation will soon be here.

Hurrah

From LifeSite News:

It has been a very tough haul, but in the end the Catholic Bishops of Canada are making substantial reforms to one of their organizations which was using funds collected in Catholic parishes across the country to fund groups that advocate for abortion.  While still on-going, the purgation of Development and Peace of its funding of groups at odds with the right to life is finally becoming a reality.

Deo Gratias. Feel free to donate to their cause. I'm going to.

Not-so-desperate housewives

Slowly getting back on my feet after spending many weeks coughing and whatnot. Cold and flu season: there's no upside, except getting to stay home from meetings.

Never mind burqas and FGM! Modern feminists are too busy going after soccer-mom evangelical preacher gals and their fans. My latest post at Mercator Net's Family Edge blog.

Boo.

Yes, you read that right. Boo!

The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light....

Dear Mark,

Get well soon!

I would plead similar circumstances for my lack of blogging, but I don't think being boring is considered a health issue...yet.

BREAKING NEWS!!

Religious Affairs Correspondent writes erroneous story about Pope!

Oh, wait, that happens just about every day.

First of all, the Pope isn't the CEO of Catholic Inc. who can change "company policy" on condoms. And even if he did hold such a position, to say that using a condom to avoid transmitting AIDS is less immoral than transmitting the infection is hardly the same as saying

...the pontiff will end the Church's absolute ban on the use of condoms.

It's also less immoral to give your friend a clean needle with which to shoot heroin than it is to give him an infected one. So the Catholic Church must approve of it!

"Less immoral" is not equal to "moral" or even "approved". Keep dreaming, liberals. And go here to read an explanation of the Pope's words by someone who actually knows what she is talking about.

DOH is One Year Old Today!

Grab a chair

and a piece of birthday cake

as we take a poetic walk down memory lane and relive all the highlights of our first year of blogging:

December, 2009: A link from Steyn
September, 2010: It happened again
That's it for me. How 'bout you, Mrs. P.?
I'll be over there, stacking all these chair...s.

From Ezra

Who knows a shakedown when he sees one.

Christians: The Usual Suspects

I don't watch that much TV, but I've seen more hypocritical, abusive and self-righteous Christians on the tube than I've ever met in real life. So it's quite refreshing when someone decides to write a script in which Christians are portrayed as ordinary people. Not perfect, not super-saintly, but ordinary.

A couple of weeks ago The Office aired an episode entitled "Christening" in which two of the main characters have their daughter baptized. I find it interesting that a sitcom would venture into this territory, and that the most unpleasant people at the baptism were the show's other main characters: mostly cynical, snide, and self-centered, they were completely oblivious to the significance of the event being celebrated by their two colleagues. A real a**holier-than-thou attitude, if you will pardon my phraseology. Granted, their behavior was in keeping with their conduct in other episodes, but I am so used to seeing Christians depicted as the villains of the piece that their normality in this episode was remarkable to me.

Snide cynicism was not the only response to religion in the show; one character who admits he and God have "a lot of catching up to do" is shown later facing the altar of the empty church and asking plaintively of the Almighty, "Why d'you always gotta be so mean to me?" Another character is literally carried away by his yearning for the joy and camaraderie he sees among the members of the church's young adult group, but later realizes that, as another colleague pointed out earlier, "Church isn't a party." For a 25 minute sitcom, I thought they packed in some serious thoughts about religion.

The other show where I have lately observed the rare and exotic "Ordinary Christian" is a new program called Blue Bloods, which follows four generations of the Reagan family, several of whose members are or were New York City police officers. I have seen four or five episodes, among which can be found scenes of  characters saying a Catholic grace before meals or pausing to pray in a church.  In one episode ("Smack Attack") the sex abuse scandal is mentioned without the implication that every priest is either a molester or covering up for one. Really, you have to see it to believe it. Mr. B. and I always have a chuckle when a priest has to be questioned on your average cop show: the detectives wander into the church and the Padre comes scurrying out from behind the altar as though he lives there. Blue Bloods is guilty of this visual cliche, but I'm willing to cut them some slack, given how much I've been enjoying the show.  The bad guy hasn't yet turned out to be a Christian fundamentalist working for Big Oil, and Tom Selleck lit up a stogie in the second last episode. What's not to like?

Here's hoping for more script writers who are willing to step outside p.c. bounds.

My latest post

At MercatorNet's "Family Edge" blog: "Does the school board need to know Johnny's sexual orientation?"

Many thanks to Mrs. Beazly for originally posting the story here. (Expect something tasty and sweet in the mail at Christmastime in recompense...unless you'd rather have cash.)

By the way, it's only 6 weeks till Christmas, and yes, I am officially starting to panic...

And speaking of nutty...

This little gem from Ralph R. Reiland at American Spectator.

Here was [Maureen] Dowd's instant analysis on the morning after the nation's voters delivered a stunning and nationwide defeat to Democrats: "Even though it was predicted, it was still a shock to see voters humiliate a brilliant and spellbinding young president, who'd had such a Kennedy-like beginning."

What planet has she been living on for the past two years?  

Mr. Reiland sums up:  

Ms. Dowd's description on the morning after of the previous night's political winners? Simply "a lot of conservative nuts." Quite a catty, bitter and erroneous depiction of events by a top columnist at the so-called "paper-of-record."

I'm more positive about President Obama getting his wings clipped. I think it's healthy for people to increase their skepticism about someone who declared, speaking of himself, "We are the ones we've been waiting for."

Barack Obama: "Not technically insane"

David Warren: ya gotta love him.

...yet in the course of getting himself elected he said many things that were over the edge, including meaningless abstractions about hope and change, and actual suggestions that he could do things like stop the seas from rising. He is not "alone" -- nearly 70 million people voted for him, and a few million of those are still "hoping for change."

[...]

Consider, however: Barack Obama, though a little larger than life, is the caricature of a typical, career politician. The sanest of them can be disconcerting to converse with, at close quarters. The need to maintain various pretences, from sanctity to infallibility, contributes powerfully to habits of mental aloofness -- to the point where no question can be answered candidly.

Most journalists make reasonable allowances for the fact a man is a politician, but there are some like me who don't. While the condition may be mysterious, and the cause not singular, to me mad is mad. It has several times struck me, in meeting directly with "power," that if I heard a man speaking like this, while riding on a trolley, I would assume he was an outpatient.

Mrs. Blurn, this one's for you

Enjoy.

OOOPS!! Wrong Richard Armitage! Ahh, here we go:

Mrs. Beazly gets credit for this joke, having pulled it in a recent email to me.

Dear hoarders, you don't have to save ratty old catalogues

Because these are available at the library, or Amazon.

London is a riot

Life in Europe is just looking more and more scary. Carolyn Moynihan of MercatorNet discusses the latest riot over 'austerity measures' in London. The chickens of the welfare state are coming home to roost. Or smash and burn, as the case may be.

...there is something quite sickening about the petulance and fury of well-off people faced with losing some of their privileges when you consider that, not only has most of humanity never had such comforts, but that right now millions of people in under-developed countries don’t even have a roof over their heads. [...]

How, in the face of so much human need and suffering, can we spoilt children of the West complain about a little hardship -- assuming that is what the current wave of changes will actually bring about? Shouldn’t we be ashamed of our tantrums and reckless disregard for the rights and dignity of others that increasingly accompanies them?

.

We are the lost.

I wanted to post the video of Libera  singing "We Are the Lost," based on the poem "In Flanders Fields," but embedding has been disabled for some reason.  The song is beautifully done, so do jump over to You Tube and watch the video.

There's just one sad little irony in all this. The lyrics do not follow the poem entirely, faithfully. The lyricist has removed the line, "Take up our quarrel with the foe."

If we refuse to confront our foes, either out of cowardice or some misguided notion that pretending we have no enemies will make them go away quietly, then we have already broken faith with all those who died for our freedoms. We are the lost.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

from his poem "For the Fallen" by Laurence Binyon. Read the entire poem here.
On a related note, do read this piece by David Warren. "The quarrel"
.

My new gig with MercatorNet...

Check out my latest post on the "Family Edge" blog on Australia's MercatorNet, "a voice for human dignity on the internet."

Earth to Planned Parenthood: people drive economies

Eradicate the national debt and financial crisis by eradicating the nation’s future citizens? Good luck with that.

PP’s logic dictates that someone whose birth has been planned is more likely to be an asset to society, as opposed to someone whose birth was unplanned. Real life, however, doesn’t always follow that model. Many successful people emerge from less than ideal circumstances. “Rags to riches” stories (and there are many) in business, art, entertainment, and sports, will bear this out. It’s preposterous to suggest that the circumstances of one’s conception determine one’s destiny.

I will be blogging regularly (weekly) with Family Edge from now on. (Well, let's hope!) I've found that making commitments is the easy part...

Oh. My. God.

And I mean that as a prayer, a cry for mercy, not as a vain use of the Lord's name. I'm still hoping this is just some kind of hoax/fake tabloid headline. How do you spell "ICK"!?

Woman Gives Birth to Homosexual Son's Baby

You. Just. Can't. Make. This. Up.

LifeSiteNews

It's bloody well amazing.

At least someone isn't just screwing around at the lab.

I can hear the conversation now:

"Yeah, we turned skin into blood. It could revolutionize cancer treatment! What's going on at your research facility?"

"Uhhh...we got people to look at meat."

Getting at the meat of the issue

More proof that our institutions of higher learning are losing their way:

Sight of meat calms us: study 

No, it's not from The Onion. Let me guess - the scientists who did this study thought it up while they were getting plastered at a buddy's barbecue.

  Kachanoff said it's difficult to say what practical applications could result from the study's findings.


I'll bet.


 

In the shadow of the Chesterbelloc

I'm ashamed to say that I had never before heard of Maurice Baring, until today (thank you, Dale Ahlquist and EWTN). Now I'm going to start reading whatever I can find of his work.
From a short article by Joseph Pearce:

Ten of Baring's books were translated into French, with one - Daphne Adeane - going through 23 printings in the edition of the Librairie Stock. Others were translated into Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Hungarian, Czech, Spanish, and German, a true and apposite reflection of the author's panoramic vision of European faith and culture. [...] Like a great literary light hidden under a bushel of neglect, Maurice Baring's work still has the power and the potential to shine forth like a beacon of faith and culture in a faithless and cultureless age.

Yep, "outrageous" about covers it. -or- Thank God for Home Schooling!

The Ottawa school board wants to know your twelve-year-old's sexual orientation.

There are nine options to choose from, including “prefer not to disclose.”

It's a multiple choice test! Which one of the three Rs does this fall under again? Ridiculous? Repugnant? Really, really intrusive?

Of course sexual orientation is not the only thing they want to pry into. This article contains a link to the survey. Read it yourself, and contemplate what our schools are becoming.

Mrs. Pinkerton's two cents: The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation. Unless, of course, it's the nation's children's bedrooms, and then it can be there without parental approval or permission. Prying into your inmost affairs...for your own good!

The Life of Pie

You know our readers will be clamoring for it.

Purity Pastry (from the Purity Flour Cookbook)

Yield: One 9" double crust pie or two 9" pie shells or 12-14 medium sized
tart shells or 24 small tart shells or 48 REALLY small tart shells or 96
minuscule tart shells or....well, you get the picture.

Blend or sift together:

  2 cups all-purpose flour
  1 teaspoon salt

Using a pastry blender or two knives, cut in

  3/4 cup shortening

Sprinkle with

  4 to 5 tablespoons cold water

Add the water one tablespoon at a time, mixing lightly with a fork until
all the flour is dampened. Turn dough onto a piece of waxed paper and
form into a ball. Chill if desired.

Bake as directed for the filling recipe. For a baked pie shell, prick
with a fork at 1" intervals (the crust, not you) and bake in a 450 F
oven for 10-12 minutes or until golden brown.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever

A pie, on the other hand, lasts about 15 minutes. Mr. Beazly, this one's for you. I made pies to celebrate Mr. Pinkerton's recent milestone birthday, cuz he's only going to turn 50 once. And if you have to be half a century old, you might as well eat pie. (Flavours in photo below: saskatoon, apple, peach and pecan.) Being domesticated is fun, now that I know how to make a good pie crust (thanks for the Purity recipe, Mrs. Beazly!) Photo courtesy of Doris Rose Jones Photography

Because nothing highlights the importance of having a home...

...more than wrecking someone else's.

Nothing gold can stay.

Mark Steyn's "Lock Up Your Adjectives" Canadian mini-tour has come to an end. I hope it will not be his last, but if he decides not to return to the "deranged Dominion", I may yet hope to catch an appearance across the border.

Of all his Canadian stops, I think I am most sorry to have missed the one in London. Everything I read only makes me wish more that I had been there.

Incidentally, no one should be surprised that "He's no Ann Coulter". He's already pretty busy being Canada's Brigitte Bardot.

In case you were wondering just how meaningless the word 'racist' has become...

...it's now being applied to inanimate objects.

...some blogs...claimed Kinect is unable to detect dark skin tones. Consumer Reports, however, said its tests show there is no substance to such claims.

Luckily, Consumer Reports is there to defend the Xbox Kinect from this damaging accusation. You can't undergo testing to determine if you are racist (yet), but here are a few simple pointers.

If you admit that you are able "to detect darker skin tones", not to mention cultural and religious differences, you are probably racist. Unless of course you have been instructed to hire employees or admit students based on their color rather than on their merits, abilities or character - then skin tone is of crucial importance. Also, if you disagree with someone whose skin tone is not the same as yours, you qualify as racist...unless your skin tone is darker than theirs - then I guess they would have to be the racist in that situation...unless you vote Republican, because then that would cancel out your skin tone.  Your racism can even be divined by the greeting cards you purchase, which brings us nicely back to our first topic of racist inanimate objects. See? it all makes perfect sense.

Proud to be part of the Alternative Catholic Media

Orthodoxy is no longer being stifled in the Western church, and the lef-lib namby pamby types in power don't like it at all. A great article by Hilary White at LSN. The video of Michael Voris is worth watching.

Last June Bishop Gabino Zavala, the head of the U.S. bishops’ conference communications committee, said that there is “consistent agreement” between bishops that the orthodox Catholic blogs and websites are “most alarming.”



“We are particularly concerned about blogs that engage in attacks and hurtful, judgmental language. We are very troubled by blogs and other elements of media that assume the role of Magisterium and judge others in the Church. Such actions shatter the communion of the Church that we hold so precious.”

Mmmhmmm. Wonder what communion he's talking about? The kind that they give indiscriminately to pro-abortion politicians?

And how about that hurtful language! This sort of language? "You brood of vipers" "You den of thieves," "You hypocrites!" "You whitewashed sepulchres." I think that guy from the Gospels said all those things.

Or maybe he means language like "Taliban Catholic"...  My bad--it was a liberal who made up that one.

The church is in trouble because there hasn't been enough strong language used in the past 40 years. They made out like everything was groovy, but it's not.


Like that guy said, "Do not think that I came to bring peace..." (Matthew 10:14)

Because there aren't enough real problems in the world...

...let's wring our hands about the Minifigure gender ratios in Lego sets.

Except for when they are recreating Stargate SG 1 episodes in the medium of Lego and need a Captain Carter, my kids don't seem to care what sex their Lego guys - oops, persons, are. In fact, they have been known to add injury to the insult of under-representation by using a female figure's long hair and flowered shirt to create yet another male role model: Dippy the Hippy.

I'll bet he's still living in his parents' storage tub.

h/t Sobering Thoughts

Thanksgiving Every Day

A wonderful reflection by Mark Shea.

Could you be this generous?

I have a feeling I couldn't.

UPDATED :The Hippy-Dippy Interpretive Dance Fundraiser for Darfur

You'll understand the title when CTS posts Mark Steyn's appearance on The Michael Coren Show. It doesn't seem to be on YouTube yet, either, but do watch for it. Mr. Steyn is well worth listening to, as usual...good thing, because my antenna doesn't pick up CTS very well so I couldn't see much of a picture.

Toward the end of the interview Mr. Steyn talked about  the decadence of our secular culture and how it offers immigrants little incentive to assimilate. He also spoke briefly about some prominent atheists' warped view of the contribution which Christianity has made to our civilization. It's too bad his time ended shortly thereafter because I'm sure those topics would have made for another couple of hours of interesting discussion.

The video is now on YouTube. Here's part 1 of 4.

Which to ban first, the chicken sandwich or the egg?

The egg.

I don't think I want my city's law and order entrusted to this guy.

Docked pay should only be the start.

To Our Dear American Friends

Have a happy Election Day! And by that I mean, "Throw the bums out!"

You know who they are, no matter what party they belong to.

Speaking of clinging to guns and religion...

Don't expect the mainstream media to report this story anytime soon (EWTN):

Evangelical Christians Attack Baghdad Catholic Parish During Mass; Dozens Slain

...er, no, wait; I made a mistake...

Islamic Militants Attack Baghdad Catholic Parish During Mass; Dozens Slain

Gunmen linked with al-Qaeda stormed a Catholic church in Baghdad during Mass on October 31.

“They entered the church with their weapons, wearing military uniforms,” said an 18-year-old who survived the attack. “They came into the prayer hall and immediately killed the priest.”

After the gunmen took the worshippers hostage, US troops and Iraqi police stormed the parish in a rescue attempt. One gunman detonated a suicide belt, and a shootout ensued, leaving 39 hostages and seven members of security forces dead.


The Islamic State of Iraq-- the Iraqi al-Qaeda affiliate-- said it was responsible for attacking what it called “the dirty place of the infidel which Iraqi Christians have long used as a base to fight Islam.”

May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

Rage, yes; pointless, not remotely

Scary, but Mrs. Beazly and I (though  thousands of km apart) were posting on virtually the same phenomenon at the same time. (BTW, Mrs. B, what the heck are you doing awake at this hour?)

Punditry from the always enjoyable Ms. Wente:

The media think they understand why people voted as they did. As one Toronto Star pundit helpfully explained, the voters – Ford voters, that is – “were full of largely pointless rage.” Only pointless rage could explain why voters ignored the editorial endorsements of two leading newspapers, as well as a long line of former mayors who begged them, in the name of decency, to vote for George Smitherman. Even Justin Trudeau’s twinkle dust didn’t work.

[...]

Both Barack Obama and outgoing Toronto mayor David Miller insist the voters simply don’t appreciate what they’ve accomplished. They say their only real mistake was to not focus enough on positive PR. Both the Democrats and Toronto liberals are convinced they know what’s best for the masses, even if the masses massively disagree. They believe that many of the people who vote for their opponents are basically deluded, ignorant and poorly educated (even though the Republicans are currently leading by 20 per cent among U.S. college graduates). They also believe the people on the other side are basically intolerant, anti-immigrant racists (even though a pre-election poll said half of voters born outside Canada were set to cast votes for Mr. Ford).

Americans believe their country is in crisis, and they’re right. By next year, the United States will reach Third World debt territory. Yet both major parties seem oblivious. Neither of them has a plan, or even publicly acknowledges the severity of the crisis. If the Tea Party does nothing else, it may at least force the Republicans to face this highly unpleasant fact. If Mr. Obama wants a second term, he’ll have to face it too.



[...]


Although Canada is far more blessed, even we won’t entirely escape the massive restructuring that faces almost every country in the Western world. The problem is simple. People have a lot more government than they can or will pay for. Mr. Ford and Tea Partiers know that. Scaling down the scope of government is the political challenge of the next generation. And if mainstream politicians stay in denial, they’ll be toast.

Radio Rob

This Rob Ford interview with As It Happens is a hoot. It seems that Mr. Ford gives as much respect to the media as he (and his supporters) got from various media outlets during Toronto's mayoral race.



Shocking, isn't it? We are used to well-mannered politicians who only say nice things: they  helpfully remind us that we're apt to spend all our money on beer and popcorn, or inform us that we vote for the "wrong" candidates because we're stupid, angry or afraid. They constantly point out that we don't know what we really need or want because our tendency to cling to guns and religion makes it impossible for us to think straight. The mainstream media seems to agree that all these things are perfectly true of the great unwashed. That must be why it's so satisfying - not to mention entertaining - to witness a politician effectively flipping the bird to the CBC instead of insulting the electorate.

From our bulging "Beyond Satire" files

"Iran, where a woman convicted of adultery has been sentenced to death by stoning, is likely to become a member of the board of the new UN agency to promote equality for women..."

Both Iran and Saudi Arabia are "vying" for spots on the committee. They oughtta get along great with the hardcore fembots, since they all hate women and womanhood. Via The Jerusalem Post. (h/t Steyn's "Ports of Call"). 

One simple solution? Deep-six the UN altogether.