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.