"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.