Happy All Saints' Eve

Would you let your daughter dress up like a witch  feminist? Pundette.

And it's not even Halloween yet

Adults (who don't need them) wearing diapers? Incompetent fools dressing up like the President? The Steyn (and no, he's not one of the fools. How I wish he would run for prez...)

"At a million-dollar San Francisco fundraiser today, President Obama warned his recession-battered supporters that if he loses the 2012 election it could herald a new, painful era of self-reliance in America." 

Oh, no! The horror! 

"Self-reliance" is now a pejorative? Nice to have that clarified.

[...] 

Is it too late for a Self-Reliance Awareness Day? No, there's no ribbons. Make your own damn ribbon. If that's too much to hope for, how about a Multi-Trillion-Dollar Debt Awareness Day? The ribbon starts out black but turns deeper and deeper red. How about a We've Spent All The Money Including The Money For An Awareness-Raising Ribbon Day? An Impending Societal Collapse Awareness Day? 

Yes, yes. I'm aware the cost of diapers adds up over a month, and you can't use your food stamps to pay for them. Tough. This country's broke. As I said last week, it has to pay back $15 trillion just to get back to having nothing at all. And that's more money than anyone ever has had to pay back. Were you aware of that? Distressingly large numbers of Americans still pining for ever more swaddling in the government cradle seem entirely unaware.

h/t Pundette 
.

Just sayin

The Steyn, on that "driving lesson" gone wrong:

It's hard to see what Canada has to gain from admitting significant numbers of people from the culture that spawned the Shafias. Perhaps in time one could make functioning western citizens of them, but it would be a slow process and, even if we had the stomach for it, would be unlikely to justify itself in cost-benefit terms. So instead they come and settle into a culture that asks nothing of them. And slowly but remorselessly we adapt to them: Police departments learn to tiptoe round touchy subjects like "honour killing"; hospitals evolve from "FGM" (the pejorative "female genital mutilation") to "FGC" (the less judgmental "female genital cutting"); and a courthouse in Ontario discreetly reorders its day in order not to inconvenience the translators that "Canadian citizens" now require:On Fridays, the judge told the jurors, the lunch schedule will be shifted so the interpreters, all male, can get to mosque for prayers.The multicultural experiment is not worth it. By the time those who foisted it on the post-war west acknowledge that, it will be too late.

Feminism, Feminism, wherefore art thou, Feminism?

.

I think I need this mug

Because it just feels right. 

More Savage Chicken gear here.
.

Pro-abortion teachers' unions

And other incongruous delights. Mark Steyn points out some facts that Joe Biden sorta forgot to mention when he visited the fourth grade class in PA...

Since 1970, public school employment has increased 10 times faster than public school enrollment.



Five years ago (the most recent breakdown I have), the [York City] district had 440 teachers but 295 administrative and support staff. If you're thinking that sounds a little out of whack, that just shows what a dummy you are: For every three teachers we "put back in the classroom," we need to hire two bureaucrats to put back in the bureaucracy to fill in the paperwork to access the federal funds to put teachers back in the classroom. One day it will be three educrats for every two teachers, and the system will operate even more effectively.


As in so many other areas of American life, the problem is not the lack of money but the fact that so much of the money is utterly wasted.
.

Steyn on modern education

"the great advantage of mass moronization is that it leaves you too dumb to figure out who to be mad at."


via Pundette
.

Why oh why

When kids say their tummy hurts, but they are hungry (and stomach flu is going around), and you tell them that they should have a piece of toast and some clear juice, but NOT to have a baloney sandwich... they have a baloney sandwich. And some cheese.

Do you know how much fun it is to hand-pick tiny pieces of baloney and cheese from carpet with a fairly deep pile? Well, it's not. I think I want a Shop-Vac for Christmas.
.

The exquisitely brainy

...and always entertaining Pundette:

I hope the kids were as tuned-out to Biden's unctuous pitch as they appeared, because the odds are slim that dear teacher (who has trained them well in the art of the drone, if the beginning of the video is any indication) will explain, after the sage giver-of-gifts has zoomed away in his thirty-car motorcade, why the York school district has no money, or why soaking -- er, asking -- the rich to throw more dollars at them will never, ever, ever make their schools better.

[...]

Our bureaucrat-heavy schools are collapsing under their own weight and the kids are the ones getting crushed.

Seeing these poor kids sitting passively in their government classroom learning to mindlessly swallow the wonders of entitlement and class envy is positively nauseating. 
[...]


So most of the kids are poor readers and can't do much math. This is how liberalism perpetuates itself.
.

Sorry for the silence

That's the nature of family life. Er, not silence, but the lack of blog posts. Health issues, the very least of which was a visitation to our home of stomach flu and head colds. We sally on. In the meantime, do something useful.

Mom enjoying a picnic with Dad & the kids, Summer 2011

A funny, smart blog

Maybe because we seem to have so much in common. Some snippets and samples:

 Dog barf and light beige carpet is a marriage made to last forever.


As a housewife, I am probably supposed to be fairly adept at housekeeping.  You might be a little surprised to learn, however, that I actually stink at it.


Left to their own devices, though, teens have about the same impact on housekeeping as toddlers.  They are always and everywhere eating.  They have way too much stuff to keep track of; and they will take and lose your car keys.


Sound the trumpets!  Cue the ticker-tape parade!  It’s the 100th post here at the Uncommonhousewife Blog!  It took a little over a year to get here, which I’m feeling pretty good about.  Readership, on the other hand, could use some work.  


Yes, Uncommon housewife, we feel your pain.
.

Boo hoo

The Gap clothing company is apparently doing poorly. Pardon me for not caring (except for the workers who will lose their jobs). Maybe now it won't be official company policy to be snotty and mocking towards believers at Christmastime. 
.

Pat Archbold LOL

"There are certain phrases that conjure up images so frightful one shudders at the mere mention.  Swarm of killer bees.  School of piranha. National Meeting of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions. Brrrrrrr."
.

Is there an algebraic formula for this?

Number of redundant adverbs is directly proportional to school admin. political correctness and (joy-killing) cancellations of traditional holidays.


...her “intention is to be very, very sensitive to all of the many, many cultures” of Somerville.

h/t Steyn
.

Lax Europa

Steyn does a pre-mortem on Europe. 

"Once large numbers of people acquire the habits of a leisured class, there are not many easy ways back to reality." [...]   

A land of 30-year-old students and 50-year-old retirees has so thoroughly diverted the great stream of life that it barely comprehends what's at stake. "Europe" as a geopolitical rather than geographical concept has been for half a century the most conventional of conventional wisdom. Those, like Britain's Euroskeptics, who dissented from it were derided as "swivel-eyed" "loony tunes." The loons were right, and the smart set — the political class, the universities, the BBC, Le Monde — were wrong. "Europe" was a blueprint for sclerosis and decline, and then a sudden, devastating fall..

Wanted: political leaders who are not brain-dead

This is not rocket science, people!
"Fiscal sustainability requires that government debt cannot ultimately grow faster than the economy."
.

Another view

...of  Wall Street and all that stuff. From the Distributist Review.

Our message is simple: job creation is a thing of the past. We can create jobs of our own through the bottom-up approach of the Distributist program. Yes, we should discuss economic policy in America, and when injustices are perpetuated against the middle class and the poor, it is absolutely right to protest, just as we should when the genocide of abortion is carried out with the support of the private and public sector. We march, we pray, and we counsel. But the debate shouldn’t be over which sector, public or private, can offer us the sweeter deal. We should “change the terms of the debate,” and ask ourselves if the discussion over who gets a job is relevant, and if perhaps the creation of an ownership society is the remedy for over 100 years of conflict between capital and labor. Distributism eliminates the friction between capitalist and laborer by making them one and the same person. I haven’t met a capitalist or socialist who can find anything wrong with that, and most of the people I interviewed praised a society of micro-property.

It's recycling day at DOH!

OK, I figure if Mark Steyn can do this, so can we--posting old pieces, that is (there, the comparison ends). This column first appeared in the now (sadly) defunct news magazine Alberta Report (also known as B.C. Report, or Western Report, depending on which province you received it in) way back in 2002. Some things never change. Others change for the worse. I am struck by the innocent naïveté we had a decade ago, in such things as thinking that violence and anarchy at demonstrations were unusual; now they are de rigueur. The conclusion also suffers from the delusion that reason and dignity should (and can) prevail in debates. If you believe that, then I have a Wall Street Occupation to sell you. 

Original title: People are focussing on the nudity--who'd have thought?

I like it when things are neatly classified

Father Erik has a very thorough system of classification (see below) for bad liturgical music. He's reviewed a good number of current hymnals in his ongoing "Index of Forbidden Songs" posts. First one here.

 C=Castrated, DO= Dubious Orthodoxy, DMWP=Don't Mess With Perfection, DS=Dan Schutte, DTD=Done To Death, EP=Ex-Priest, G=Germanophobic, H=Heretical, HH=Haugen&Haas, HL=Hella Lame, LC=Leftist Crap, NAU=Not About Us, SIGV=Singing In God's Voice(i. e. we are not God, SWTR= Stick With The Rite, TMV=Too Many Verses, WIG=Where is God?


h/t Coffee and Canticles

Calling Mrs. Beeton

I'm posting this link because it's so utterly foreign to what Mrs. Beazly and I are used to, with our well-appointed, designer, looks-like-it-came-out-of-a- magazine home decorating styles.


Amy Hughes Reveals Secrets to Salvage 


"Lots of people have trouble wrapping their head around the notion of salvage, because again, they have the idea that it's junk."


Um....all I can say is, come to my house and I'll prove it to you inconclusively. You can even take some home with you if you like. And if you promise not to bring it back. 

shoe shelf: old kitchen cupboards turned backwards

baskets: dollar store

tool box stand: 70's stereo speaker (non-functioning)

.

Some advice for the Wall Street protesters

From David Warren:

This is the unanswerable argument to the Left of all ages: Instead of trying to coerce someone else to do what you think is right and just (and every Left policy I have ever seen involved coercion of the non-Left), put your money where your mouth is. Go "liberate" cash by legitimate means (within the laws), then set an example in how you spend it.
Give, until it hurts, to the most needful. And you can volunteer your free time into the bargain, for in my experience, you cannot begin to know who is most needful, until you have rolled up your pant legs and waded into action.
Give the money instead to almost any "progressive" charity, and it will never get there. This is because, quite apart from corruption (which always exists when free money is floating about), the progressive idea of charity is agitprop. That is: give us your money, and we will lobby the government on behalf of the poor destitute victims whose plight is depicted so dramatically in our pamphlets.

[...] 

 But now comes the disappointment. For I am recommending a course that gives none of the rewards craved by the cavorting young ego. There is none of the euphoria of street demonstrations, none of the easy applause (and easy sex) that comes from boldly posturing as one of the "good people," fighting against the "bad people."

The rewards for doing something, where it counts, are different in kind; and they do not come easily.
I look at all the faces of the young, made up as zombies, clutching that fake dollar-store money, and strutting down Wall Street. Most, obviously, college-educated: the final products of an educational system that imparts little knowledge but a lot of self-esteem. I look at the sheer smugness in those faces, of people who have never experienced real hardship. All demanding that someone else do something.

Do read it all.
.