Bird-free Zone

Thinky Thoughts...

2011-09-26T16:31:00.002-04:00

Amid all the class warfare and "tax the rich!" nonsense, no one seems to have stated the obvious. I figured this was because it WAS obvious. Now I am not so sure...

So, a little thought for those of you convinced the millionaires can make up the overruns on the public treasury: The "Rich" don't pay income tax. Because, technically speaking, they don't earn income. See, money comes from two sources. A man works and earns it from his employer. Or money itself works; it moves around in the economy, accruing interest and paying dividends. "The Rich" do not typically work for a living, they move money around. All the income tax reform in the world won't squeeze a dime out of them.

Which leads me to the obvious point... "The Rich" know how to move money around. They have a degree of economic mobility the rest of us lack. That economic mobility translates to physical mobility and moreover, to personal autonomy and socioeconomic power. I'll put it simply- you can't squeeze "The Rich" because "The Rich" have a power the middle and lower classes do not; if things get bad enough, they can leave.

They've been leaving for decades, and we as a nation are poorer for it, because they go, and they take their money with them. It stops funding innovation, research, and employment in this country, and starts "working" elsewhere. Meanwhile, the government starts looking around at who is left to take money from. The answer is always the middle class. See, the poor don't pay taxes; they don't make enough money to do so in our "progressive" income tax system. The middle class, however, are in a bind... they make "extra" money (by lower class and governmental standards) and they are tied to jobs, mortgages, and debts that mean they can't go anywhere. Often their "wealth" is tied up in retirement plans they dare not touch, and homes they cannot easily sell.

The truth of the matter is that "taxing the rich" is a myth, a dream. What they're really talking about is "taxing the trapped."

Ranty post: Quit assuming I'm stupid because I'm female.

2011-02-21T18:10:00.002-05:00

So my laptop needs a new lcd screen. There is currently a spreading crack from top to bottom that makes viewing a website something akin to a Jackson Pollock painting. So I decided to go get some estimates on screen replacement. I figured I'd get a few, then do some looking at customer reviews of the businesses, then make my decision. I'm not even sure yet that I will fix this thing; I may sell off its component parts and buy a new one; the parts go for quite a bit on ebay, and in the three months since I bought it, the price for my laptop has gone down 200.00. Dell's warranty apparently covers everything BUT my screen; they won't tell me how much to fix it til I pay to ship it to them. I'm not going to ship it off so they can hold it hostage to whatever price they choose to quote me.

The three "small business" computer repair places around here surprised me; only one of them will give a written estimate for free. That place quoted me 205 for the job. The other two quoted "ranges" of prices- one said 184-240, but wanted 10.00 to put it in writing. The other said 250, but refused to write it down at all and said "it might change once we get it open." Neither of these folks inspired confidence in me.

But the worst of the worst was Best Buy. Their very sincere-sounding employee told me it'd be "at least 500" and then said, "but honestly, if it was me, I'd just toss it and buy a new one." The laptop is three months old and cost 729.00. Toss it? He's either the stupidest man who ever lived, or he's just plain evil. My guess is, he looked at a middle-aged housewife-type and the dollar signs just clouded his vision; he thought he could sell me a new computer instead of quoting me a price on fixing this one. Asshole. I swear, I loathe people like that; I will likely never set foot in Best Buy again, after the experience. He wanted to take advantage of me, only he didn't know I'm NOT stupid and I already priced the job elsewhere. (Actually? I priced the screen online myself- 150.00; I just was gathering job costs in order to decide if it's worth me fixing it at all, or fixing it myself. The hassle of finding a schematic online, and borrowing appropriate tools, might make it worth paying someone else to do it.)

Anyway, I just wanted to put this out there: Best Buy's "Geek Squad" service is a scam, designed to prey on the ignorant. Don't shop there, don't use their services. Put them out of business.

Post - Partisan Academia?

2011-02-08T13:31:00.003-05:00

This is truly the article I thought I would never see. The NY Times examines anti-conservative bias among psychologists. I can think of a number of professors I've had over the years who could stand to read this piece; portions of the anthropological community bank hard to the left. Many is the time I've sat in a classroom biting my tongue so hard it might bleed, trying not to answer back to commentary that makes me, and my values, the butt of a joke. The soft sciences all seem to lean left, with a strong emphasis on "social justice" and cultural relativity.

I'll buy cultural relativity writ small; if we're to study societies then we should study them without prejudice. But to be honest, I'm not sure what part "social justice" should play in anthropology;if an ethnographer is documenting a people, is it right to also advocate for them? Is there a conflict of interest? If you're an archaeologist, to whom do you owe your loyalties, the bones in the ground, the people living in the area, or the people (sometimes states away) laying claim to them as ancestors? (In reality, I think the loyalties may too often go to whomever paid the grant money. But the right answer ought to be "to the truth," regardless of what sacred cows get gored.)What about the folks doing research into human genetics- is it okay to investigate the differences between genders and ethnicities? What if we bump into things nobody wants to hear? What about investigations into human origins and the first migrations out of Africa- is there any danger of political bias there as well? (Non-africans derive some small percentage of their genome from Neanderthals; imagine how something like that could be twisted for racist use.)

Whenever we examine paradigms, we look at the historical context of the argument. Unless we're talking about "Now." The now never gets contextualized by current trends, everyone assumes that we're all past the colonialist, racist, misogynist, anti-whatever crap of the past. And we definitely are not; the present era has its own shibboleths and bugaboos and sacred cows beyond which we dare not tread. Humanity still has prejudices and preconceptions, just different ones. Myself, I'm looking forward to a Post- political correctness period in American culture. That is, whenever we get one.

Egypt

2011-02-04T12:44:00.003-05:00

If, like me, you have been watching the news voraciously, you might be wondering, "Why the hell aren't they talking about the antiquities? How bad is the damage to museums, and archaeological sites? What about all the foreigners who were there doing research?" And you might be quite angry that none of this information is showing up on CNN or Foxnews. Fortunately, there's plenty of accounts coming in online- unfortunately, they're contradictory and full of rumor.

This looks like a good place to keep up on the more solid accounts:
http://egyptopaedia.com/2011/

The information about Saqqara is confusing; Some sources say the tomb of Maia (Tuthankamun's wetnurse) has been completely destroyed; Hawass is saying nothing happened there. I'm hoping he's right.

2011-02-02T20:10:00.003-05:00

Book Review by Melissa Nussbaum

“Don't Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle”
by Daniel L. Everett
Vintage Departures, 2009 first edition
New York

In 1977, Daniel Everett made his first trip to the Amazon, beginning a course of study that would dominate his life for the next two and a half decades. He did not go as an anthropologist or ethnographer, but as a Christian Missionary and a classically trained Chomskyan linguist. Among the Piraha people, he lost his faith in God and Noam Chomsky. He went home an atheist, and proceeded to publish papers that enraged mainstream linguistics and still generate controversy a decade later. Everett's, “Don't Sleep, There are Snakes,” is both autobiography and ethnography, at once a study of a people and a study of the author himself. It tells a unique story: how the Tribe converted the Missionary.

Everett currently serves as Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He is the primary authority on the Piraha language of Brazil. According to his CV, he speaks Portuguese, Piraha, and his native English fluently. He describes his Spanish as “fair,” and his French, Italian, and Koine Greek as “reading only.” He has also studied literally dozens of native American languages and identified the Amazonian language isolate OroWin in 1994. His anthropological interests grew out of his linguistic research, and much of his ethnography is derived from his linguistic research in the field. His book's focus is on the Piraha people and their culture and society; he reaches his conclusions based on the relationships he formed while learning their language over the course of more than twenty years of living and working alongside them.

Everett divides up his book in two sections- the first is devoted to cultural questions, and uses personal stories and vignettes to treat diverse subject matters. He attempts to shed light on a tribe that has, historically, been difficult to access, utilizing a language that has been inscrutable to the outside world. His book contains sections on Piraha culture, community, family and kinship, as well an entire chapter devoted to his methods and the mistakes he made in sussing out those details.

Everett references the lessons he learned from the Piraha, “ both scientific and personal,” but acknowledges that, “someone else would no doubt have learned other lessons.” Thus he owns his interpretations, but acknowledges that there could be alternative understandings of his data. By the end of his tale, Everett has a new outlook on the Piraha. His conclusions rock his faith in his religion, as well as his conceptions of how language and culture interact. In the course of learning Piraha, and getting close to the Piraha people themselves, Everett comes to see that much of what he thinks he “knows” is wrong.

The Piraha tribe live in the Amazonian interior, and is comprised of about 300 individuals living in small villages; Everett has lived with and studied each of these groups in the course of his research. In his book, the voices of the tribe members come through clearly, he quotes conversations with many people recorded across the totality of his career. These persons are clearly drawn characters with distinct personalities and viewpoints. They are not mere research subjects, but friends, allies, enemies, and strangers. Occasionally, they are just the neighbors, and he talks of how it was to live and work with them. Through these relationships, he comes to better understand how the Piraha see other native tribes, as well as Brazilian society at large, and Americans like Everett himself.

He comes to understand their social mores and cultural values, and seeks in vain for hallmarks of anthropological study such as myths, folk tales, or religious practices. Repeatedly he looks for expected cultural commonalities, and finds that they are not there. Once he accepts that they aren't, he is forced to ask himself why- and his true work begins. Everett must uncover why it is that the Piraha don't talk about their ancestors, or make up stories to entertain themselves; he must learn why they have resisted the missionaries and resisted “civilized” ideas such as counting, numbers, money, and powerful languages that would give them more agency in the larger economy. His answer is profound and, to some degree, intellectually threatening. It strikes at the heart of modern linguistic theory and our current ideas about how and why language use evolved.

The first half of the book is more autobiography than ethnography. Everett examines his preconceptions through the lens of a two-decade history, and marvels at his youthful naivete'. He tells the story of how the natives saw “spirits”in their environment. He could not, and he tried to reason why that was, without success. He says, “As a scientist, objectivity is one of my most deeply held values. If we could just try harder, I once thought, surely we could each see the world as others see it and learn to respect one anothers' views more readily. But as I learned from the Piraha, our expectations, our culture, and our experiences can render even perceptions of the environment nearly incommensurable cross-culturally.”

This is the crux of Everett's argument; that culture affects every aspect of our life, even the way we interpret sensory information. He tells the story of a caiman he failed to spot in the jungle. He says, “My inability to see beyond my own nose is a source of constant merriment among the Pirahas...This had been another lesson about cognition and culture, though I didn't quite realize it at that time. We all perceive the world the way our cultures have taught us. If our culture-constrained perceptions hinder us, however, then for the particular environment in which they do so, our cultures obscure our perceptions of the world and put us at a disadvantage.” To Everett, the inability to perceive nature spirits is no different than the inability to make out the red-eyes of a caiman lurking in the tree canopy; his cultural perceptions have him trained to spot cars and pedestrians, because they are the dangers encountered in the urban environment. The Piraha spot prehistoric reptiles and nature spirits that warn them out of the river; these are their native dangers.

The second half of the book focuses on the linguistics of Piraha, but buried within it are cultural examinations of something he terms, “ the experience principal,” as well as ruminations on religion and spirituality. The overarching theme of the book itself is not only what Daniel Everett learned about the Piraha people, but what he learned from them. Everett comes away from his time with the tribe with completely new worldview. He realizes that the Piraha are the happiest people he has ever known, and that they are happy, not in spite of, but because of the social institutions they lack- a hierarchical government, personal property, or a belief in Gods or an afterlife. He takes away new ideas about the origins and arrangement of language, and the relationship between language and culture.

The tribe itself has had sporadic contact with the outside world for centuries, but all attempts to “civilize” the Piraha have failed. While other tribes have gone extinct, or blended into the larger Brazilian culture, the Piraha have rejected the trappings of mainstream Brazilian culture, and have remained almost exclusively monolingual. Their kinship system covers the self, and the generations preceding and following the self. They use absolute directions (North, South, East, and West) given in relation to the river; they have no words for right or left. They lack words for yesterday or tomorrow. They have imported their pronouns from another native language, but this seems to be the limit of their borrowing. Despite regular trade contact with Portuguese speakers, they have not incorporated words from that language into their own.

Their language is incredibly complex and difficult for outsiders to master; it has one of the smallest inventories of phonemes known anywhere in the world. Piraha makes use of tones, and yet it has an enormous repertoire of verb endings. (Everett claims 65000 possible conjugations for each verb.) Piraha has evidential marking, so that every assertion contains within it an expression of how that information was obtained. For example, in Piraha, one does not simply say, “there is a monkey in the woods,” rather, one indicates that they have heard or seen said monkey. Evidential marking is not unknown in the world's languages, but it is uncommon. It also plays into Everett's larger conclusions about the nature of Piraha culture.

The language also has a high degree of allophonic variation. For example, in English, there are two acceptable pronunciations of the word, “the.” We use a long e pronunciation before words beginning with a vowel sound, but a short e before words beginning with a consonant. (“thee apple, thuh table.”) Piraha has hundreds of these allophones, enabling the language to be used in strange ways. It is whistled, hummed, or sang, and these manifestations of the language carry cultural information- children learn the language from their mothers, who interact with them almost exclusively by singing. In order to lessen their impact on game, men whistle their communications while hunting. The language can actually be understood in humming; the words themselves are comprehensible through a closed-mouth, in a fashion unknown elsewhere among the world's languages. The language has no set color words. Items are likened to blood if they are red, to dirty blood if they are black, or transparent if they are white. Perhaps most intriguing (and controversial) are Everett's claims about numerical concepts. He states categorically that the language has no counting words, no numbers, and no quantifiers such as most, many, every, or all. Unusually, the language has no perfect tenses or recursive structures. Recursion has long been accepted as one of, if not the only, universal of human language- all languages are assumed to contain the ability to embed clauses within one another, in the manner of Russian nesting dolls. For example, the sentence “This is the cat that ate the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.” contains the ideas that the cat ate the rat, the rat ate the malt, the malt lay in the house, and Jack built the house. According to Everett, there is no way to say that sentence in Piraha. Rather, the idea would exist as separate sentences- “Jack built a house. The house of Jack contained a malt. A rat ate the malt. A cat ate the rat.” This is one of the most controversial allegations of Everett's research, but it is by no means the only one.

A great deal of Everett's work goes into explaining the concept of experiential liminality, what he calls the experience principal. The Piraha place much importance on how knowledge is obtained; evidential marking indicates how one knows a given fact: it was observed visually, it was heard about from someone else, or it was deduced intellectually. (Lest we wonder if they are perfectly empirical, Everett is quick to point out that the evidential markers are often used to play jokes or to tell lies.) Non-recursive sentence structures may help limit ambiguity in statements.

“Xibippio” is a word that baffled him for years; ultimately he realized the word means something is just now coming into or out of experience- it is becoming seen or known, it is flickering on the edge of awareness, or it has just disappeared from view. Everett sees a uniting thread between evidential marking, experiential liminality, and the experience principal. And he believes this cultural aspect explains why none of the missionaries have been able to convert the tribe.

In simple terms, the Piraha only believe in what they've seen with their own eyes, or have heard in first hand accounts from other eyewitnesses. Everett calls them “the ultimate empiricists.” He recounts how he had to tell them that no one alive right now has ever seen Jesus. When hearing this, the Piraha deduced that there was no reason to believe He existed. They themselves have no stories of what has gone before, no myths, no storytelling fiction or even nonfiction about their forefathers. Once a person has died, and all those who knew him personally have died, then that person's experiences are gone. They have no concept of history. They profess no belief in any sort of a creator or an afterlife. Everett believes the function of this “immediacy of experience” principle is to keep information transfer slow and verifiable. Culturally, they empirical evidence, and Everett believes that their language has become structured in such a way as to enforce that societal value.

Everett chronicles the slow shift in his own perspectives and in his methods of gathering information. He goes from the etic, to the emic- from socially-outside observer to socially involved participant. Early in the book, on page 70 he explains , “I wanted to come up with a theory of Piraha identity based on my own observations. At this time I had only minimal training in Anthropology, so I was largely groping in the dark.”

He apologizes for this inexperience in a painful recounting of errors he made early in his research, and describes how he surrounded himself with Anthropology and Sociology textbooks as he tried to work out methods for gathering information. He quotes extensively from journals kept furtively, scribbled in whenever he had shut himself up in his little house. He could not take notes adequately while traipsing about the jungle, but neither could he rely on nighttime solitude to write-up the days' events. The Piraha do not sleep through the night. Rather than a single stretch of sleep, they take short naps throughout the day or night, evincing a social belief that sleep deprivation makes them “hard.” Hard is good; hard is wary, alert, and alive. Everett is not “hard,” and his weakness for sleep, food, and shelter is a source of amusement to his neighbors, along with his strange predilections for writing in notebooks, praying to God, and recording people's voices to tape. If anything, the Piraha humor him, and watch out for him and his family in the manner of indulgent parents with some not-terribly-bright children.

Everett describes his interactions with the Piraha, and how they change through time. Initially, he is a missionary, they are wary and suspicious; as his research interests grow, a sort of trade develops between them. In the beginning, the Piraha come into and out of his house at all hours, but only engage in his tests if and when the whim hits them. When it does, there is usually exchange involved- the Piraha will humor him for access to trade items, or in exchange for favors. Ultimately, the relationship becomes that of friends and equals, with participants learning from each other on both sides.

Everett tries desperately to improve their lives, but over and over he misunderstands them and makes the wrong assumptions. He tells of how he hired someone to teach them to make dugout canoes, since they steal them. He bought tools, and with their teacher they made a canoe. Later, they came to him wanting another canoe, and he told them to make one. “Piraha do not make canoes,” he was told; the tools were left untouched, abandoned to the elements. Later, he comes to understand that the Piraha make disposable tools; they weave poor baskets that do not last, and dispose of them when the material they were crafted for is gone. They make knives that can be easily and quickly replaced, they steal canoes if they need them, or strip birch trees to make single use birchbark canoes. Even when they know how to do something the outside world does routinely, they are very slow to incorporate it into their own culture. The Piraha are extremely culturally conservative. This is perhaps why, despite centuries of contact with cultures who use counting and money, they do not use these themselves.

Everett does not go into great detail about the methods he used to gather data, except when explaining the ways in which he tested Piraha number sense. He describes how he would use fish in groups of one, two, or more, to elicit words he initially took for “one” or “two” or “many.” Then he describes using two larger fish, and one smaller fish, to elicit the same words but for different groupings. Then he explains how he identified this “one” word with the suffix that was attached to the word for “man” to create the word for “boy.” Thus the word did not mean, “one”, it meant “a small amount.” Subsequently he proved that the other words meant “a larger amount” and “the bulk” (a very large amount, all or almost all.) They lacked numbers in any concrete sense; all number is relative quantity based on context.

One goal of the book is to show how living among the Piraha changed his life and attitudes, but Everett also intends the book as a challenge to a primary tenet of linguistic theory. While his work has been embraced by Neo-Whorfians as evidence of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in action, he himself does not go that far. (The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the idea, first promulgated by Edward Sapir, that language affects thought. Essentially, that the type of language a person speaks affects the sorts of ideas, and thoughts, that they can think.) Writ large, it suggests that societies differ based in part of the differences in the structure of their languages. Neo-Whorfians, embracing the work of Sapir and his successor, Benjamin Lee Whorf, suggest that language affects thought in rather smaller ways- such that a language that lacks distinct color words will impact its speakers so that they are slower to distinguish shades of color than speakers of a language with many color terms. Rather than take on Sapir-Whorf, Everett challenges the very notion of the Language Instinct (the idea that all humans are hardwired to speak languages organized along similar, biologically-specified lines), by attributing the oddities of Piraha language to particular cultural values they possess. Primarily, he sees their principle of “immediacy of experience” as a potential reason for their language's evidential markers and and non-recursive structures. That is, Everett doesn't say that language effects thought, but rather that cultural values shape language use. In the same way, he accounts for their lack of number sense by examining the communal nature of their property, and their innate social conservatism. Anything unique to the outside world is, to the Piraha, largely uninteresting. It is not part of their daily experience, and Everett claims that, for the Piraha, experience trumps all else. Experience is reality.

Everett's is clearly a confessional tale, in that it acknowledges his shortcomings and incorporates his personal experience of events. But it also draws upon conventions of the impressionist tale, retelling stories in a dramatic first-person perspective. It reads well and quickly, and the subject matter lingers with the reader, raising as many questions as it answers, encouraging the audience to think more deeply about what it means to be human, and the ways in which humans use language.

Book Review- "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue" by John McWhorter

2011-02-02T20:09:00.000-05:00

John McWhorter's “Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue”
Gotham Books, 2008
A Review by Melissa J. Nussbaum

The Linguist John McWhorter subtitles his book, “The Untold History of English,” and he delivers on that promise. There is little in the way of the usual tale, such as we might know from PBS's “The Story of English” or the Baugh and Cable textbooks used in introductory linguistic classes around the globe. But there's a great deal about the structure of language, the ways in which language families differ, and how historical situations of language contact have left their imprint on the language today.
This tasty little tome clocks in at just over 200 pages, but it navigates everything from orphan Germanic loanwords to the mysterious, meaningless “do” that permeates every question we ask today. Along the way, McWhorter gets in his licks at linguists who ignore everything outside their own area of interest, prescriptivists who tell us we speak wrongly, and academics pushing discredited theories about the structure of languages dictating types of thought. In some ways, the book is the author's rant against academic inertia. But it's a very polite rant, rendered in a breezy, conversational fashion.
McWhorter studies creoles, languages that grow out of a contact situation, passed on by adult learners in an abbreviated, altered form. It's common to find that an English word traces back to Latin, French, Greek, or some other language, but McWhorter makes the point that this situation is not unusual. Languages in contact exchange words. As he puts it, “Languages like sex,” and he points out that pretty much every language borrows from its neighbors. For McWhorter, the story isn't just about the words, it's about the syntax. Changes to syntax are a lot less common than word-borrowing. For the grammar to change, something has to happen to a language. McWhorter has intriguing theories on what some of those happenings were.
He suggests that English grammar is “in a word, weird.” English not only outsourced a third of its vocabulary, but it shaved off most of its cases and tenses, chucked its gender, and rearranged its word order. He offers a mouthful of words in this example sentence: “Did she say to my daughter that my father has come alone and is feeling better?” It's awkward, but it's very recognizable English.
And it's all wrong. English is a Germanic descendant of Proto-Indo-European, and a good, card-carrying Germanic language is ordered and constructed in a particular way. “Said she to my daughter that my father alone come is and himself better feels?” McWhorter examines those syntactic changes and ties them into historical context, suggesting that English is, “Miscegenated, abbreviated,” and “interesting.”
McWhorter tells a convincing story, the tale of a language battered by contact, crushed under the heel of Viking invaders and Norman French conquerors, and seasoned with Celtic quirks. But he's not content just to examine the weirdness of English. He goes back further, investigating the mother language. He says, “There was a history of bastardy in English long before it was even a twinkle in Proto-Germanic's eye.” Simply speaking, Germanic languages pronounce Indo-European sounds in a way that suggests everyone speaking the language had a speech impediment. Linguists call this, “Grimm's Law,” and it describes sound changes from Proto-Indo-European into Proto-Germanic. “P,” “T,” and “K” turned into “F,” “Th,” and “H.” Pater becomes Vader. Vader becomes Father.
But who messed up Proto-Germanic? Not surprisingly, McWhorter has a suspect for this crime. He hypothesizes a contact situation between Proto-Germanic and some Semitic language in the dark recesses of prehistory. In evidence, he offers a strange structural anomaly in the Germanic languages: strong verbs. These are verbs that indicate a change in tense with a change in internal structure. Come, Came. See, Saw. Drink, Drank. This kind of tense-building is wrong for Proto-Indo-European, but it is de rigueur for Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew.
McWhorter's book reads quickly and easily, but it's jam-packed with information and ideas that are almost unheard of outside the realms of academia. For the layman, it is an excellent introduction to the study of the English language. For the academic, it is an enjoyable survey of some of the latest thinking in the field. Either way, its well worth its price in hardcover.

2011-01-06T17:41:00.002-05:00

I just found out about this exhibition, but I am so going to squeeze it into my schedule this week:

http://www.npr.org/2011/01/03/132412112/the-prehistoric-treasure-in-the-fields-of-indiana

2010-12-08T11:48:00.001-05:00

2010-11-28T10:14:00.001-05:00

2010-11-19T15:18:00.001-05:00

Asinine

2010-09-11T13:57:00.004-04:00

Ah, copyright law, is there any malfeasance it cannot do? In my life I've "bought" assorted computer programs for myself, my kids, my uncle... physical copies with fancy packaging (that I promptly lost) which take up shelf space in my living room. But I now discover I did not, in fact, "buy" anything at all. I rented. And I do not own these pieces of software, if they contain licenses for use. The Supreme Court says that license is not transferable, as it has been since 1909. My ancient copies of "Family Tree Maker" and "Encarta" and Berlitz are not actually mine- because I am not permitted to sell them. Mind you, not that there's anyone out there who'd actually want my twelve year old copy of FTM, but if they did, I couldn't pop it into a yardsale and let it go for a quarter- because Ancestry (who bought the company) isn't making any money on that quarter. And If I do it, I might be jailed or fined or what have you, like a proper criminal.

And of course, if "shrinkwrap" licensing can apply to software, why can't it apply to everything else? Put a sticker on the book covers, cd covers, etc "Thou shalt not sell or give license to use this product." The First Sale doctrine is dead.

When will the public wake up and realize how much the changes in copyright law have taken from us? I talk about this with most people and get glazed eyes, confusion, or outright hostility. "Why shouldn't copyright be forever? Why shouldn't people get paid for their work?"

And that is NOT the issue. Of course people should be paid for their work- because if they aren't then they've no incentive to go on working and creating new things. But where does that right stop? How long and for how much are we on the hook? Because if copyright is eternal, then ownership never transfers. IDEAS will never transfer, never go viral and morph and change into new things. Cultural transmission will be hampered and crippled, and society as a whole will be impoverished, rather than enriched.

baby talk

2010-09-09T23:04:00.003-04:00

I can't help it- I think this project sounds utterly fascinating. I often wish I'd made more detailed observations on my own boys' speech acquisition. Of course, full-time audio/video coverage for the first. three. YEARS. would've been hard to pull off in the mid-nineties. But still- imagine getting access to that much data, being able to have it evaluated independently by multiple observers- this fella has given us a whole database of information on language acquisition. I hope someone else tries this. Lots of someones, maybe.

I also like the idea that recordings allow both the child's output, and the parents' input, to be examined. It might shed light on how "impoverished" the stimulus really is. I know in our house, I talked to the boys an excessive amount. I had to; they were my only conversational partners for about five years! So I tended to provide running commentary on everything, all day long. I've known other mothers who are equally verbose with their infants; I suspect there's a lot more exchange going on than Chomsky thinks.

My grandmother used to do this thing with babies. I know everyone does their own kind of babytalk. We all pitch our voices up to some degree and talk expressively. But mamau had her own odd little babytalk thing going on. A baby would babble, and she'd look at it seriously, in dead earnest, and conversationally go, "You say your chicken died?" (No kidding- that was a regular knee slapper around here.) But the funny thing I recall is how babies less than a year old frequently responded as if she wasn't making any sense. They looked- confused. Sometimes they'd stop talking completely, other times they'd get sort of irate, and the jabbering would be louder and more insistent. They responded much better to her alternative? "Really? Well... You don't say!" But tinier babies would just gibber back enthusiastically to anything. It was as if they recognised they were being engaged in conversation, they just didn't have the code yet. Older babies recognized conversation, and seemed able to intuit that the speech itself wasn't "right."

(And yes, I have asked babies if their chicken died. I'm not sure where she got it, but it must have pinged itself into my babytalk repertoire in infancy.)

See, this is why English is a fun language...

2010-09-09T14:16:00.001-04:00

I've had a while to think on Sarah Palin's weird little portmanteau "refudiate," and I find that I like it. It adds a single-word shade of meaning that encompasses both refutation and repudiation at one blow. But then, I'm usually happy to embrace new words into my vocabulary... they just aren't usually so highbrow. I'm partial to the dichotomy embodied in words like "shitastic" and "craptacular," for example, when attempting to express overwhelming levels of suckitude. Incidentally, I'll also say "underwhelmed" and have actually said things like, "moderately whelmed" when the occasion calls for it. My vocabulary also incorporates such phantom adjectives as "ginormous" at times.

Go ahead, pelt me in rotten vegetables or whatever. I don't care. And I'll still come out swinging with my second-person plural every time, y'all. Don't misunderestimate me.

2010-08-25T23:58:00.001-04:00

2010-08-25T23:56:00.001-04:00

Hee hee hee....

2010-07-19T21:29:00.001-04:00

Intellectual property rights (Again)

2010-06-23T19:30:00.000-04:00

So this isn't showing up all over the blogosphere, and I don't know why. Because it should. While the President's assing it up, having squabbles with his military leadership in the pages of Rolling Stone-...while the media is saturating us with Gulf Hurricane! Oil Spill! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE Wharrgarble.... something insidious just happened.

If you don't want to clicky the links, I won't force you. But know this: Zombie Copyright is here, and it doesn't look to be going away. Remember Eldridge V Ashcroft- remember what I told you then. Eternal copyright on the installment plan. Keep paying campaign contribution "Bribes" to your congresscritters and you will always get your copyright extension, while the public domain starves for new additions.

Well, the public domain's under attack again. In order to come into line with "Europe's" copyright laws, stuff can be removed from the American public domain.

Dammit, I want out of here. I think? I want off this rock. Is there noplace left to go in order to have Freedom? Real, physical and intellectual freedom? I guess not. His Highness even shuttered our space program, so our grandkids won't be able to escape either.

Genealogy Post- thinking out loud

2010-04-22T20:01:00.000-04:00

Summer's come, and it's the season for my research to begin anew. I've been at this since 1997, but it's always so piecemeal. I'd give anything if I had the time and money to work on this as much as I want to.

I've decided this summer to work the bottom branches. Goal? Find Thomas B. Lambert- find his grave, records of his kids... anything. He's my grandmother's grandpa and he's a damn ghost. I don't even know what the B stands for, for certain. Someone named "Sunny Lambert" cited him as Thomas Bluford Lambert- but I've no idea where she got that middle name. I'd sure like to find her and ask!

So here's the mystery and the clues: Thomas, born abt 1857 to Thomas B. Lambert Senior, and his wife. Cousin Edna gave me the middle initial and the "junior," and told me that he and my greatgreatgrandma Letitia had the three girls, Zadie, Cora, and Deola (my greatgrandma) and a baby son who died. I tracked down record of newlywed Thomas and wife "Lottie" in the 1880 census. Pretty sure Lottie is supposed to be Letitia; the ages match up and they're in Port Royal, Henry County, where Letitia's family had been for generations. But he's dead by 1900, wherein Letitia is head of household in Jefferson county, widowed, bringing up her girls. And although she has her girls, there are three dead babies to account for, not just one; she gives number of kids as seven, with only three now living. One would THINK I could find birth recs for at least one of these seven offspring, but so far, no dice. No death recs either, for the kids or for their father. Perhaps none were recorded? Edna told me she thought he was probably buried "on their farm," but that was before she was born; she had no idea even what county the farm was in.

Damn I need the 1890 census. Anyway- what I know (or think I know) about Thomas: I've found him at home with stepmom and dad as a boy in earlier census recs; living in Grant county, KY. Not a far piece from Henry. I've actually found other folks who've tracked Thos Jr's mom and dad's lines, but the man himself is an enigma. He intrigues me. Frankly, he's the best looking fella in my family tree. And his wife, lord love her- well, maybe she was one of those ladies who is beautiful when she smiles. I have their wedding tintype, but.. perhaps it's one of those bad hair/clothes days for Letitia. Not all brides are beautiful.

Anyway- that's mystery one, goal one. Goal two? Find out what Hatfield sired my greatgrandmother's daddy. (On the other side of my Mom's family.) Moses Dial married Nancy Welch... but he didn't father two of her sons. "Jefferson Davis Dial", my ancestor, is supposedly a bastard Hatfield. I've got them in Wyoming county, WV in 1860; Jefferson Davis Dial is born in April of the following year. I need to find out when Moses left for the war. Figure that Pappy Jeff was conceived June or July of 1860 in time for an April 1st birthday. Anyway- I've looked at the 1860 census and there's a goodly number of young Hatfields to account for in the neighborhood. I wonder what the liklihood would be of finding a male-line descendent from one of Nancy's byblow boys, and getting a dna test? Most probably, the hatfields all share their Y chromosome anyway though, so finding the RIGHT one would be a challenge.

Skillet love

2010-04-14T14:07:00.002-04:00

Today I stumbled across an article about the basic necessities of a functioning kitchen. But I won't link it for you, because it was useless. Oh, yes, it had some practical advice about knives and sheet pans- but it dismissed cast iron with a single line. "I like cast iron, and I have used it in some kitchens for nearly everything; but it can be more expensive than this quite decent cheap stuff, and it’s very heavy. "

To the author, I say this: You, sir, are no cook. And you can't shop worth a damn.

Whenever one of my friends marries or has a housewarming, I hit the flea markets and thrift shops. Your humble Ornithophobe is not inherently cheap about wedding gifts; there is method to my madness. A "new" cast iron skillet is both expensive and ill-made. Its surface is microscopically pockmarked and uneven. That will show in your cooking, as no amount of seasoning will completely eradicate sticking to such a surface.

No, for my gift-skillets, I look for the battle-hardened veterans of cookery. The older, the better. A bit of rust doesn't frighten me. Time and again, I've dug up the skillets of your great-grandmothers, moldering in boxes at yard sales, or collecting dust on thrift shop shelves. The most I've ever paid for one is a ten dollar bill- but I've also found an egg skillet for a quarter. Right now, on Ebay, there are dozens available in the under 20.00 range, some sitting unbid at 99 cents and no reserve. Lovely Griswolds and Wagners, and lots of nameless beauties waiting to be returned to service. Just watch out for the shipping!

Anyway... once you find your skillet, you need to restore it- take the gunk off, strip it down to bare metal. A go on self-clean in your oven will do for the nastiest ones, but most can be taken care of with a plastic scrubby and copious quantities of hot water. Salt makes a good abrasive in a pinch. Once it's stripped, it needs reseasoning. Rub the warm skillet down in a thin layer of lard and bake it for a few hours. Repeat this step two or three times, before welcoming your skillet back to work. The first thing you should cook in it is a nice bunch of bacon; it'll work wonders for the smoothness of the finish. Then maybe fry up some chicken and give it a proper workout. If you've done the job right, the finish will be smooth, not lumpy, and the surface will not be tacky to the touch. (Tacky means too much uncarbonised fat; strip and start over.) A good skillet is a deep black in color, with a glossy inner bottom. To keep it that way, wash in HOT water and spare the soap- it won't really hurt your skillet but it damages the seasoning.

I do most meats in my skillets, but they're also indispensable for corn bread, eggs, sauteed vegetables... they even make good cake pans. (Try pulling off pineapple upside down cake without one. Go on, I dare you.) And nothing caramelises sugar faster than cast iron. I'd no sooner try to cook in a kitchen with no cast iron than I'd try to cook without, oh, I dunno... food.

2010-03-27T19:48:00.001-04:00

I really think it's time to get out of Dodge...

2010-03-27T13:06:00.000-04:00

"For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death."-- Robert A. Heinlein

Maury says, Akhenaten, you're the father...

2010-02-17T11:47:00.002-05:00

So Tut's DNA results are in, and they are fascinating. I won't link you, because JAMA is charging 15.00 a pop for the article... but you can look at the stuff elsewhere in bits. (cough, EgytianDreams forum, cough.)

But basically- Tutankhamun is the offspring of full-siblings, the mummy in KV-55 and the mummy identified as the "Younger Lady". KV-55 and the younger lady are the son and daughter of Amenhotep3 and the mummy identified as the Elder Lady, now definitively identified as Queen Tiye. The babies in Tut's tomb are his kids, and also the kids of another unidentified female mummy. But the paper is silent on the relationship between KV-55 (putative heretic pharaoh) and said unidentified female mummy. Also silent on Younger Lady and unidentified female mummy.

More questions than answers right now. If no relationship between unidentified female and the parents of Tut, who the hell is this woman Tut was breeding with? Is it possible the relationships exist, and haven't been stated for some reason? Could further testing flesh this mess out?

I'll put my suspicions out there. When all is said and done, I'm betting the Younger Lady actually is Nefertiti- that we've been wrong about her nonroyal background. And I'm betting the unidentified female is Ankesenamun.... which would mean the babies were born of multi-generational inbreeding.

Of course, if Kv-55 mummy is potentially Akhenaten, there's equal chance he could be Smenkhare.... but that would mean he had a wife other than Meritaten, and that he was not the son of Akhenaten but rather Amenhotep and Tiye, making him the heretic's brother.

Again- more questions than answers.

Obama to the people of the USA: No can has moon. Not yours.

2010-01-30T10:45:00.000-05:00

Heck, why not put our money into looking for Atlantis and Mu while we're at it?

I've changed my mind: Obama's not "naive" and "idealistic." He's arrogant, bullheaded, and downright unintelligent. He cannot have missed Climategate, Glaciergate, etc. Either he's the most willfully ignorant, uninformed man to hold office in my lifetime- or he's just plain stupid.

Wake me when we can vote this incompetent schlub out of office. And pray it happens in time to save this nation from his foolish, meddlesome iniquity.

A Timely Reminder...

2009-12-01T08:31:00.000-05:00

Climaquiddick...

2009-11-30T12:30:00.000-05:00

I'm not going to link anything here; if you want the details, head over to Wattsupwiththat.com, or hell, just throw "CRU" "Jones" and "Mann" into a search engine. Even google can't suppress this story; throw Climategate in and you'll hit paydirt. (Of course, you won't get autosuggested.)

If you haven't read the emails, you should. They're yummy; salacious and gossipy. No, if you've any familiarity with the sort of cliquishness that goes on in academia, they won't really shock you. We've all seen stubborn bullheaded people blinded by their beliefs before, nothing new there.

But what you really need to read are the code files.

It's all a scam, anthropogenic "climate change" is bunk. We've all been had, to the tune of millions of dollars in grant money.

I started reading this crap a week ago and it's still fascinating. This is Piltdown and Lysenko all rolled into one.

If only the journalists would, you know... do a little journalism. They can spare a dozen fact checkers for Sarah Palin's book, but they can't find a few folks who know Fortran to do a little investigating?

More fun with the farm bill

2009-11-20T08:18:00.000-05:00

You know, the more I learn about how our congress operates, the more concerned I become. Frankly? I'm starting to think amendments, insertions, and riders should be prohibited from bills under consideration. I'm also starting to think that no bill should be permitted that cannot be read by your average congresscritter in an hour. Furthermore, I think the buggers ought to be tested on every bill before they're allowed to vote on it; no pass, no vote, your constituents are shit out of luck and should've voted for a smarter human being. Better luck next time. Hey Barry, didn't you promise me that I could look at every bill coming up for vote before it hits the floor? How's that coming, any sort of ETA on when I can expect that "change"?

Just FYI, y'all ought to be checking your furniture for place-of-origin and tree species. Supposedly this asinine idea includes labeling for all wood products, including paper. I wonder if they'll have to tell us where our printer paper comes from. Or our paperback books- will they have to leave room on the back cover to tell us "this book printed from pulped garbage and 100% domestically grown American sprucewood"? Oooh. Wonder if they'll have to label the ginormous bills that congress votes on, too. Ooh. Rubber trees- will rubber stuff have to be labeled as well? Will those quarter bouncy- balls in the machines all have to have a sticker on them saying where their rubber comes from? THE LABELS! Will the label stickers all have to say what they're made out of, too?

It's about time...

2009-10-02T05:00:00.000-04:00

Okay, I'm a little late to the party, I know. But I want to pontificate on Roman Polanski for a moment. Be not alarmed, gentle reader- I shall not make apologies for the man. "Brilliant director," I keep hearing. Alas, I've seen a grand total of three of his films- Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, and Tess. Mind you, I loved Tess, but then I love Hardy, so I would've seen it regardless. Anywhoo... it occurred to me today that in all three of these movies, there is a recurrent theme. Some innocent young girl is always being taken advantage of by some wicked man. So I got to wondering, just how many of this man's movies involve rape?

So Hollyweird wants his sin expiated. Or at least some of the louder and less sane parts of it do. Sorry, for that he needs apply to his priest, not fellow perv Woody Allen. Never has the divide between middle America and the entertainment elite seemed so vast. I rather want to grab some of these folks and shake them. "Have you daughters?" I wonder, "Would you trust this man with your child?" Or is there some sort of karmic sliding scale these "compassionate" people would employ? One murdered wife and child exchanges for one rape of an underage girl?

Yes, he's old, yes, she forgave him, yes, the judge was an imbecile and the case was wonky. But it was wonky from the get-go; he should've gone to trial. What sort of people craft a plea bargain for drugging and sodomizing a thirteen year old girl? And yes, Ms. Goldberg, it WAS "rape-rape." What is described in the victim's statement is not just statutory rape, it's rape by coercion and force.

I told you this was coming...

2009-08-22T14:19:00.000-04:00

Law of unintended consequences and all that. Damn CPSIA law strikes again. They're coming for the craigslisters, and the ebayers, and the thrift-shops, and your yardsale is next, bub. Nobody sells kiddie crap without first crossing federal palm with the requisite silver. Walmart's already prepaid for the right to sell cheap shit to the public; you haven't. And you can't afford to.

Cash for Clunkers... the ugly truth.

2009-08-21T11:41:00.000-04:00

Let me preface this post with my own car-owning history. My mother bought a brand newDodge Omni in 1985; this is the only new car I ever remember our family owning. When I started driving in 1992, it passed to me, and was my first car. It was followed by an 87 toyota corolla (bought in 94), and a 95 corolla (bought in 97.) This year, I reluctantly parted with the 95, replacing it with a 2000 Mazda MPV (which lived less than a month) and finally, my current car... I've gone oldschool; she's a 92 Toyota Corolla, with 25000 less miles on her than my old 95. The point to this is: I buy used cars. I am the used-car market, and until this year, I bought cars that were slightly used- a couple of years old when they came to me. New enough to be reliable, and used enough to be affordable.

I'm the market that will be adversely affected by Cash for Clunkers, a program which rightly should be called Handouts for Rich People; as it helps buy cars for the wealthy, at the expense of the poor. Poor people don't buy new cars, they don't get new cars every couple of years. No, my fellow struggling students, single mamas, etc; we buy a car for cash, and we drive it until pieces start falling off in traffic. Or even after; the 95 hadn't had left windshield wiper in a year when I said my goodbyes.

So I'm more than a little put out over this. Have a look-see at what becomes of the "clunker" after Obama buys it. I must say, I was a little sick looking at such colossal waste. If he HAD to buy these things in order to prop up the new car market, why not at least make the clunker available to the used car market? or if it can't be sold as a driveable car, why not part it out to keep other cars running? Why this need to destroy perfectly good, drivable cars?

These are not "clunkers" in any sense of the traditional understanding of the word. Every one of these cars has to have had insurance on it for the previous year; clearly, that means most of them were driving until they went in to be killed. Let's make this very clear: public tax money, spent to destroy saleable merchandise, during an economic recession/depression. Who on EARTH thought this was a good idea?

The brilliant minds who thought up this swindle are right now hard at work overhauling our healthcare. Feeling under the weather yet?

Completely Non-political genealogy post

2009-04-26T00:59:00.000-04:00

This will be a completely non-political post. I'm putting it here because Googlebots can pick this up and make it searchable, whereas they miss a good bit on the various genealogy boards. Besides, I'm not sure where I'd put a post like this on those anyway...

I have been researching the family history since 1997. Over the years, I've made contact with dozens of cousins all over the country. I've also lost contact with them the same way. People switch providers, people get divorced, people lose contact. Life happens, and we lose each other.

My phone number has changed, but my name's the same and so's my physical address. And my nonphysical one. I'm Nmissi at aol dot com. If you write me there, I will get it. I've had various other addresses through the years, but that one has never gone away. I still get feedback there on really bad fanfic stories I wrote more than ten years ago; I KNOW y'all can find me!

Here's the thing... I'd like to try to arrange a get together at some point for all the various cousins. A meet and greet, swap recipes and photographs, kind of thing. Nothing massive that needs advertising- we'd meet at my home, and by way of hospitality I might be persuaded to make lunch. I can cough up a few local relations, but for the distant cousins, I'm gonna need some help. So... I know they're out there somewhere: Leslie Shover, Karen Collier, Bobbette Givens, Ruth Prewitt... drop me an email? Let me know how to find you!

This message has been brought to you by the DEVER/LAMBERT/HARNESS/DIAL/JONES/TINGLE/TERRELL/FORD/BRADEN

/ATHERTON/BETHUREM/HALL/WRIGHT/WARNER commission to put names on all my photographs.

Emergency post- Blood Donors Needed

2009-04-04T03:15:00.000-04:00

If you're in Texas, and eligible to donate blood, please consider making a donation for my friend Aaron. He is in the hospital recovering from a heart bypass. Click for more details.
Please keep Aaron and his loved ones in your thoughts and prayers.

2009-03-25T14:21:00.001-04:00

Obama, translated

2009-03-23T08:14:00.000-04:00

Oh, good lord...

2009-03-13T08:53:00.001-04:00

This man was our president for eight. years. And he's a moron. Don't they teach Biology in Arkansas high schools? Isn't he supposedly a Rhodes scholar? WTF?

Bad legislation on the horizon

2009-03-11T13:16:00.001-04:00

More bad regulation on the horizon...
Is this the CPSIA for CSAs and Family Farms?

I should point out that I'm not unbiased here. Currently I supplement my child support by making cakes and pies out of my kitchen, and catering the occasional meal. In the past, I have sold off "extras" from the garden (a folding table out front with tomatoes and peppers on it, and an honor box to pay what one can) and even sold grape jelly and strawberry preserves out of my backyard. I have to wonder how this will affect churches as well- Our donated cakes and jams for the summer picnic are sold to the public. Once, a man in my parish donated a truckload of watermelons that we sold for 2.00 apiece. While Walmart and Kraft can afford these costs (and potential fines,) we can't. And I can't see myself welcoming government busybodies into my kitchen.

Bad form, Mr. President

2009-03-06T14:43:00.000-05:00

I'm not going to bitch abt the President's policies right now. No, I don't approve of them, but that's not what this post is about. I'll deal with the politics later, right now, I'm dealing with the etiquette. At this moment, I'm heartily ashamed and embarrassed for our country.

Gordon Brown gave our president incredibly thoughtful and personal gifts, demonstrating thought and taste. His wife brought presents for the president's daughters that show class and forethought. A good gift takes into account the preferences of the recipient, and the closeness of the relationship between giver and receiver. What does it say about our president, then, that the first family gave the prime minister and his family tacky giftshop crap?

The toys they gave the boys sell for 15.00 apiece in the White House giftshop. I googled the most expensive boxsets of classic movies, and it looks like they sell for about 50.00 apiece. Let us assume the set consists of maybe 5 of such boxsets- they'd still be a bargain at 250.00. Here's hoping that the movies are in the right region-code, at least. Supposedly, it was a specially commissioned boxset-so at least some thought was expended in advance of the visit- but not much research, since apparently Gordon Brown is not big into movies.

Honestly, it looks as if about five minutes before Brown's arrival, someone went, "oh, crap, we're supposed to exchange gifts? Quick, somebody jaunt down to the giftshop and see what we can scratch up."

Mr. President, didn't your grandma bring you up better than this? Mrs. Obama, what kind of raising did YOU have? One does not put so little effort or thought into a gift for a treasured friend, and Britain is the best friend the US has in this world. You might say, we're more than friends, we're family, the UK is the mother country. Imagine that your mom comes for a visit. You know she's coming, it's not like it's a drop-in afternoon. Would YOU pick her up some junk at the giftshop five minutes before she walks through the door?

Obama can afford Wagyu beef for his cronies, but our allies get plastic crap. Lovely. This bodes Sooo well for our relationship with the UK.

Beverages as a hallmark of "Southern-ness"... a little food anthropology for y'all to enjoy.

2009-02-21T19:55:00.001-05:00

I've always thought that a better indication of "southern-ness" than the Mason-Dixon line is what I term, "The Beverage Line." If you order tea in a restaurant and it comes on ice in a glass, you're in the south. If your waitress asks, "What kind of coke do you want?" and she's offering Pepsi products, you're in the south. I'm in Louisville, KY, and I'm rather partial to Twinings Lady Grey, hot, two sweet n lows, maybe a slice of lemon. But my mother keeps a pitcher of tea in the fridge at all times, and I have been known to refer to my beloved Tab, or my son's Mountain Dew, as "coke."

Imagine my surprise to learn that science is on the case- at least, as far as Virginia is concerned. Check this out. Don't just read the text, go to the data as well. Fascinating stuff. Myself? I'd like someone to codify those variables for KY and Southern IN.

Local response to the lead law from hell...

2009-02-20T07:29:00.001-05:00

Even my local paper, the Courier Cage Liner, realizes that this law is having unintended consequences for small businesses and thrift shops. Of course, being the cageliner, they frame it as "trimming inventory." Because they suck that way.

2009-02-20T07:09:00.000-05:00

This woman is an idiot.

Demint's idea is basically to halt implementation of this law until we can clean up what we mean for the law to do. There is no threat to the safety of children, here. But SC representative Cobb-Hunter has her panties in a bunch "for the children." Ten to one she's not even read relevant EXCERPTS of the lead law, let alone the entire thing. I'm pretty sure she's ignorant of Demint's response proposal as well.

I'm starting to think we need to pass a law to the effect that failure to read a bill means you're not eligible to vote on it. I can see it now- The house leader passing out little bubble-in sheets and a paper quiz. "Okay, you have to score above a 70 on this in order to cast a vote on the subject this afternoon. Does everyone have a number 2 pencil?"

2009-02-19T14:09:00.000-05:00

Another wonderful entry on the Lead Law debacle. But even better, she has embedded a segment of Ray Bradbury talking about his love of books. Couldn't be more timely.

2009-02-19T13:40:00.001-05:00

The CPSIA

2009-02-19T12:57:00.000-05:00

Yes, it is a Terrible, Horrible, No good, Very Bad, Day....

Here is this morning's round up of news on the lead law that is destroying kiddie books all over the country. (Not to mention, dirt bikes, baby clothes, and the careers of thousands of handicraft makers.)

And Overlawyered has responded to the NY Times' ridiculous editorial in favor of the law. You'll want to read both the original, and the response.

I didn't read a ton of kid's books as a child. I read what we had in the house, which was largely classic novels. The elementary school library, and the scholastic book club handouts, introduced me to all kinds of wonderful kiddie books. Just for the hell of it, I googled to see which of those I remember fondly have been out of print since 1985 or before. Under the new law, these books are now illegal to sell.

Confessions of a Toe Hanger by Christie Harris

Runaway Alice by Frances Salomon Murphy

The Bad Times of Irma Baumlein by Carole Ryrie Brink

Tee-bo the Talking Dog on the trail of the persnickety prowler and Tee-bo the talking dog and the great hort hunt, by Mary Whitcomb

The Resident Witch by Marion T. Place

This is just off the top of my head, a few books I loved in elementary and have either picked up, or been looking for new copies of, every since. This is to say nothing of my beloved Alfred Hitchcock and the three investigators, or Encyclopedia Brown- both of which are now "in print" again. But surely more copies were available at used bookstores around the country than are sitting on shelves at an Amazon warehouse. Those books will no longer find their way into the hands of children, and I find that tremendously sad.

An Open Letter to Our New President

2008-11-05T10:06:00.000-05:00

Congratulations, President-elect Obama. No, I didn't vote for you. But in a strange way? That's good news. See, you didn't make me a ton of promises on the campaign trail, so you can't possibly disappoint me. My expectations were low going in; there's nowhere you can go from here, but up. So I have here some advice for you.

You're going to need me, and here's why. All those folks on the left who are so madly in love with you right now? They're going to be disappointed. No, it's not your fault, sir. It's just that they've built you up so much, set such high expectations for your presidency, that you cannot possibly meet them all. This is no reflection on you yourself: I honestly believe no mortal man could meet all their demands. But some of them are going to be disappointed in you, and some of them are going to turn on you. They always do.

When that happens? You will need people like me. You will need our good will. And considering that we didn't expect much from you? It will be easy to please us.

Issue one: Fight the war, let us win. Our men and women in uniform deserve no less from you than your full support. Right now, you've got the party eating out of your hands; use that power for good, for our nation's security abroad.

Issue two: Please don't take all our money. I know you just want to help out the little guy, the guy who needs a hand up- but a hand up is not a handout. Businesses don't pay taxes, customers do, in the form of increased prices. Workers do, in the form of reduced wages, benefits, and available jobs. If you want to help the little guy, protect his job. You can do that by not putting roadblocks in the way of his boss, the guy who signs the paychecks.

If you want to do even more to help the little guy? Improve the climate for business in this country. Quit spending so much money on people who hate us abroad, and invest some of that money here in our infrastructure. I can point you to some bridges and roads that could use a ton of newly-employed folks to bring them up to speed.

You can help cut the little guy's fuel bills by investing our money in nuclear power and clean coal technology. I know you said something recently about bankrupting coal companies, but I'm willing to forget that if you are. (I figure it's just something in the air in San Francisco, it makes people say and do silly things sometimes.) But I'm sure you didn't mean to insult Pennsylvania, Virginia, Indiana, Colorado, and Ohio- all those nice states with coal industries, who helped vote you in last night. I'm sure you don't want to put them out of work and I'm sure you don't want us all to be cold this winter.

Anyway, my point is, we're pretty easy to please here on the right. If you get just a few things right- the war, energy, economics 101- we'll be willing to overlook any little mistakes you might make. We're a remarkably forgiving bunch, and on the whole our patriotism is tied not to the individual, but the ideal, to the nation itself. You can make us your allies pretty easily, or you can alienate us completely. I'm trusting in your words last night. You promised me the opportunity to let you earn my support. Sir, you have that opportunity. Please make good use of it.

2008-10-25T11:42:00.000-04:00

2008-10-23T10:40:00.001-04:00

2008-10-22T09:52:00.001-04:00

2008-10-19T13:00:00.000-04:00

I stumbled across this today and it's well worth linking. Tax law explained via beer analogy. Go read it!

2008-10-04T00:48:00.001-04:00

2008-09-27T12:02:00.000-04:00

2008-09-27T00:27:00.000-04:00

2008-09-21T12:35:00.000-04:00

Time for a teachable moment. This is a fascinating look at what brought us to this current financial situation. Whether you are democrat or republican, you need to hear this, now.

2008-09-03T16:54:00.000-04:00

Wow, I still have a blog; I'd wondered if I'd neglected it so long that it disappeared on me.

I won't bore you today. My own rhetoric is vastly inferior to the acres of ink spilled already on the subject of the presidential election. Anything I could say in defense of John McCain and Sarah Palin has doubtless already been said elsewhere, and more eloquently. And fortunately, both are up to the task of fighting their own battles; two such strong characters do not need my clumsy attempts at protecting their good names.

I just want to take this opportunity to link to the best speech I've ever witnessed. Since the dying, dysfunctional medium known as the "mainstream" media refused to air it, it is my opinion that Fred Thompson's RNC speech should be posted on every conservative blog in the country; it should be mirrored and linked, transcripts should be emailed in quantities rivaling the most insidious of chain letters. Segments of the speech should be put into political ads; individual lines should be disseminated on t-shirts, posters, and bumper stickers.

I think I have just witnessed the birth of the political heir to Ronald Reagan.

Literary Travesties

2007-11-10T00:57:00.000-05:00

Why did no one tell me that the Mitchell estate had commissioned another GWTW book? I had to find out on the streets. In a grocery store. Since I was not forewarned, I had to pick it up and look at it, to establish what it was.

I feel so dirty.

I came home and googled it, and it looks as if a 'real' writer got the job this time... but it's a man. And not just a man, but a man who had, in fact, never read the original before he was hired.

Sigh. Facepalm.

Firstly, no one should ever have tried writing an authorised sequel/prequel or anything else. Unauthorised? Fine. Make with the fanfic, paid and otherwise. But slapping a label on it and calling it the "authorised" companion book doesn't mean a damn thing; it is NOT Margaret Mitchell. I view Ripley's "Scarlett" as very expensive (and not very well written) fanfic. This new book is just very expensive, slightly better written fanfic. "Gone With the Wind" is a classic piece of American literature; it may be THE "Great American Novel." So... if the idea is to pay someone to render up well written fanfic on the subject... perhaps the best start might have been to hire someone who, erm... knew and loved the book? Not just the period, but the book itself, and its characters?

Of course, it might be harder to find willing participant writers among the book's fanbase- since most of them (like myself) are a) satisfied with the book's original ending, and b)view Margaret Mitchell as something of a literary deity and personal saint. Walk a mile in those writerly slippers? No, thank you. I lack for sufficient hubris.

Genesis, the Program!

2007-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00

Dunno how long this has been around, but I just stumbled across it tonight. Genesis, the computer program! Warning, it's kind of long. But hysterical. Spew warning, beverage advisory, whatever, just don't spray your monitor when you laugh.

http://celobox.googlepages.com/god.html

Clovis First is the new Flat Earth

2007-09-20T10:06:00.001-04:00

This one's for my prehistory/anthro loving pals. It's a link to the board I lurk on regularly- Hall of Ma'at, a board which is largely responsible for my decision to take so many anthro classes this year. (I'm still dithering between a Humanities or Anthro major.) Anyway... some great pictures of microwear analyses at Pedra Furada.

http://www.hallofmaat.com/read.php?1,464743,464743#msg-464743

miscellaneous musings

2007-09-09T13:02:00.000-04:00

Nothing much here, just wanted to share some linkage:

There's a movement afoot to reopen the authorship question. The petition is signed by a number of people I respect and admire, and the declaration is a beautifully worded, short explanation of why the doubts remain. I encourage anyone who reads Shakespeare to check it out. (Okay, I encourage EVERYONE to check it out.) It's a well-made site, with a functional, realistic goal: making the Authorship Question academically viable, and reopening intellectual discussion of the issue. It doesn't purport to identify the writer (Though I'm a De Vere enthusiast) merely to make the debate available.

I stumbled over a great first-person account of what it's like to have Asperger's Syndrome, and thought some of you might enjoy the read.

After reading evilbearhunter's recent linguistics post, I decided to see if anything else had come out about Piraha. (This is that language I mentioned a while ago- the one without numbers, creation myths, and recursion.) I found a fascinating article about the folks who've been studying the people and their language. It focuses a great deal on the thoughts of the researchers, on their personal lives- but that only serves to make it more readable. It's a great description of the kind of work ethnologists and linguists do in describing a newfound language. (And it manages to discuss the issues without resorting to Chomskyan dry techspeak . This is a very good thing! I don't dispute the validity of Universal Grammar as a theory- I just wish to heaven Noam was a better writer. I have this sneaking suspicion that most people who love Chomsky have never tried to actually read him.)

Inspiring article is great reading

2007-05-17T20:10:00.001-04:00

This one isn't just for my history-language geek pals, it's for everyone. I had never even heard of this man, and that's criminal.

http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/2007/may/gilgamesh.php?page=1

A Disarmed Populace = Sitting Ducks

2007-04-17T10:19:00.000-04:00

Right now, the shrinks and the talking heads are formulating their questions: Who bears responsibility for the massacre? Why did it happen? What can we do to make sure it never happens again? They'll talk about the killer's emotional state, they'll talk about the "Gun Culture" and the dangers inherent to violent videogames and Tarantino movies.

It's all sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing. The Boomtown Rats had it right twentysome years ago: 'You can see no reasons cause there ARE no reasons.' Furthermore? I don't give a flying fig newton for what the shooter thought or felt. Why? Because I don't think EVIL can ever really be comprehended by ordinary men. What matters to me is that last question, the whole "How do we ensure it doesn't happen again?"

The answer to that seems so obvious to me that I can't imagine why anyone else cannot see it. Simply put, no one has as vested an interest in your own well being as you do. Ergo, enable everyone to protect themselves, and the problem solves itself.

I'm sure it's not a new idea to anyone. But watching the news, all I can think is, "If only some of them had been armed." But no, VA Tech was a "Gun Free Zone" for the safety and security of its students. Everyone felt soo much safer after concealed carry was banned from campus, I'm sure. Right up until the shooter chained the doors, lined people up, and started mowing them down like paper targets at the gun range.

The bad guys will get weapons. There isn't a damn thing anyone can do about that; if they can't get them legally then they will get them ILLEGALLY. But bad guys don't respect "Gun Free Zones" or anything else. If you don't mind killing people then you don't mind breaking a few arbitrary rules. Hell, in the case of Gun-Free Campus rules, you RELY on them to make your murder easier to commit. ARMED people make bad victims. They don't do what you tell them to, and they have this nasty habit of SHOOTING BACK.

An armed society is not only a polite society, it is a safer society. No matter how loudly the antigun zealots protest, the logic cannot be denied: Unarmed people are just easier to murder than people who can fight back.

The Global Warming Swindle

2007-03-12T15:37:00.000-04:00

Some days I just LOVE Littlegreenfootballs. Today? Would be one of those days. I have heard nothing about the Channel Four Global Warming documentary. So I didn't get a chance to be properly upset that I haven't seen it mentioned on the news, before tripping over the whole damn thing on LGF.

It's entertaining. It's well made. And it's intelligent, informative, and incredibly daring in this time of anthropogenic global warming mass hysteria. I can't believe they were brave enough to air this in Britain.

I am not going to argue the issue with anyone else ever again. Henceforth, when someone annoys me with their ignorance or cites AlGore at me... I'm just going to send them a copy. No more debate, just "Here, go watch this and leave me alone."

Hmm. Wonder if I can get a copy into Gore's own hot little hands?

Anyway- Watch. Learn. Understand the myriad ways in which you have been deceived.

Great Reagan Speech

2007-01-16T06:54:00.000-05:00

I can't believe I'd never seen this bit before. But it is surprisingly relevant, even now. Damn, but I love this man. Damn, but I do miss him.

Tipping my hat to The Anchoress and Cuanas for bringing this to my attention.

Never too late to learn

2007-01-15T07:28:00.000-05:00

I left school six weeks before my high school graduation. In the intervening years, I have gotten my diploma and am no longer stigmatised as a "dropout." But the sensation of intellectual inferiority remains. I frequently encounter "holes" in my public school education. (This, despite having received what JCPS called an Advanced Program education from the third grade to the twelfth.) I learned more about US history doing genealogy research in adulthood than I had ever learned in school. (Aside from "Wash Ad Jeff Mad Mo Ad Jack Van Har Ty..." I learned nothing of our presidents. I'd have been hard pressed to discuss with certainty anything that occurred after the Civil War. And we can thank my grandfather for my familiarity with that period- not my teachers.) I learned my meager math skills calculating change and tips in my first few jobs.

That is not to say that I am stupid. Far from it; I consider myself relatively bright, and fairly well educated on a number of subjects. I read extensively, and have perseverating interests in a broad variety of topics that permit me to bore my friends and relations on a regular basis. But those holes, they remain. And I trip over them all too often.

One of the areas of confusion for me has always been earth history/geology. I did not take classes in the subject. Back in elementary school, I recall cutting apart a map and gluing together Pangaea for an assignment; that was my first and last childhood exposure to continental drift or plate tectonics. Later, I would have half a semester of "earth science"- which nicely informed me that some rocks form from molten lava, some from smushed sediment, and some from alterations of the first two. That's pretty much all I took away from that class.

But I don't live in a vacuum. I read, I watch Tv. I talk to people with better academic backgrounds than my own. And so I understood, academically, at least, the idea that continents had once been united. But I didn't really comprehend it. I'd often wondered "but what about what was under the water? How does Pangaea relate to that? What topological features would have existed there? If earth is a sphere of rock, floating on a molten core, where does continental drift come in? Where would the LAND go? Where did all that land at the bottom of the oceans come from?"

Only I was much too ashamed to ask for an explanation. I am allergic to looking stupid.

Bear with me. Y'all had the benefit of learning this stuff in school; I didn't.

So I am all excited to say that, as of an hour ago this morning, I get it! I have a mental picture for the formation of seafloor. (But I still want to know what Pangaea's seafloor would have looked like.)

Lovely, lovely website. http://www2.wwnorton.com/college/geo/egeo/welcome.htm

It's like the science textbook I never had. I bookmarked it, and plan to read much more. But the best thing so far?

http://www2.wwnorton.com/college/geo/egeo/index/animations.htm

Have a look-see at that. Nifty animations that show how it all works! I can't wait to show this to my children.

Copyright Law

2007-01-07T01:05:00.000-05:00

I wrote a letter to some newspapers recently, and I think it might be enjoyed over here. So I thought I'd post it. I babble rather too long, about a subject that bores too many people, so it probably won't make print. But here goes:

I just put a book in the mail again. It's my tattered sixteenth printing of Lucile Morrison's "Lost Queen of Egypt." This book has been out of print for decades, and I loan it to at least two or three new readers every year. It's not a spectacularly important book, just a once-popular piece of young adult fiction published in the 1930's. It contains no great governmental secrets or dangerous ideas. Walt Disney has not seen fit to make a movie out of it. Simply put, the book is no threat to anyone. It is not making any money for any publisher. And it is firmly out of reach of the public domain, thanks to the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension of 1988. It will continue to be so, as long as the nice folks at the Walt Disney Company keep paying our congressmen for eternal copyright on the installment plan.

I love this book. But no school library is going to carry it today, as they did when I was growing up in the seventies. They cannot afford it. No sixth grade girl is going to stumble over a copy, discover Ancient Egypt and fall in love with the Amarna Period, as I did, unless a collector puts the book into their hands.

"Lost Queen of Egypt" was due to enter public domain concurrent with Disney's "Steamboat Willie" cartoon. This unfortunate coincidence, coupled with the heavy lobbying of our lawmakers by Disney and its subsidiaries, will keep this book forever out of the reach of its target audience. This would be a terrible thing in its own right. But Morrison's book is merely one of thousands of pieces of media essentially locked up, locked away, by this misguided piece of legislation. Right now, as I write this, there are early twentieth century newsreels and films, relics of our national history, disintegrating to dust. They are unable to be restored because of their copyright situation. There are books that will never interest another publisher, which cannot be legally distributed by any means, regardless of whether an audience exists for them.

The public needs to be made aware of the manner in which our rights in the public domain have been stolen from us. Were Walt Disney alive today, he could not legally create his "Steamboat Willie" cartoon, because that cartoon itself was a derivative of Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill" movie. The Disney corporation has ensured, through their deep pockets and legalized bribery, that no creator of new content is able to do to them, what Walt himself did to the Brothers Grim and Buster Keaton.

We as a culture are poorer for it.

The copyright issues facing this country are not about property rights. They're not about "theft" or "piracy" or any of the other buzzwords the RIAA, MPAA, and the like enjoy in their thirty second soundbytes. The issue is public culture- who controls it and who benefits thereby. Right now, the only people benefiting are those with enough money to bribe the senate and the house of representatives. Our common culture is for sale, and big business is buying. Congress is having a bargain basement fire sale of our intellectual liberties while we sit around arguing over who got a low-quality digital copy of this week's number one bubblegum pop tune without paying for it.

Altering our children for convenience

2007-01-03T19:46:00.000-05:00

I'll be honest. I'm an opinionated sort of person. Rarely do I come across an ethical issue which confounds me- by and large, my innate sense of right and wrong comes through loudly, and clearly.

So when I read about the girl who will never grow up, my first instinct was horror. How could a parent do that to their child? Certainly, she'll be easier to lift, bathe, feed, and dress in the body of a six year old rather than a fully grown woman. And that might keep her at home, and out of an institution, longer. In the care of her parents, and not strangers.

I discounted the idea that keeping her from growing breasts will prevent rape; that is so much nonsense. There are scores of children the world over who've been sexually assaulted. Cutting out her uterus? Well, she wasn't going to be using it, I suppose. And that definitely won't prevent rape, but it would prevent a pregnancy. And lord knows her caretakers have enough responsibility without dealing with a future pregnancy anyway.

But it didn't sit well with me, the idea of carving off "unnecessary" bits on a human being.

But I've been thinking about it, and I find myself, if not fully endorsing, then at least Understanding, their choice. I tried putting myself in the girl's position (a decidedly uncomfortable task) and tried to imagine what it would be like.

Imagine the intellect and comprehension of an infant; or even that of a very young child. Then imagine the body undergoes puberty. What would that be like? How frightening might it become?

It's not that hard for me to imagine, actually. Precocious puberty is defined in females as early onset of menses. For me, this horror struck at age eight. It came coupled with b-cup breasts and, in short order, height greater than the tallest boys in my school. Back in the seventies, no one called this a medical disorder. You just "Bloomed Early." And the physical and psychological effects were not discussed nor commonly understood.

Today that would be a treatable disorder. Puberty may be staved off to a more developmentally desirable time. I cannot blame my mother; she did the best she could with what she knew. There was no option of stalling the clock for me. But what if there had been? Would I have been better or worse off? I might have eliminated some of the terrors of my own childhood- the embarrassment, the teasing, the unwanted male attention in gradeschool. I might not have tried to stuff my breasts into my armpits and I might not have walked slump-shouldered to appear shorter. But I cannot actually KNOW that I would have turned out any healthier, or been more welcoming of menses at a later date. I might have hated my boobs and dreaded my periods anyway. Plenty of women do.

But I think of that fear and uncertainty- the worry that I was bleeding to death. The sudden clumsiness that came with a radically altered center of gravity. The disbelief and disgust when the biological purpose behind all these changes was made clear to me. ("THAT's how you make babies? Ugh. Gross!")And I can ask myself, if that was a traumatic thing to go through as a bright, healthy third-grader- how much worse would it be for someone with the mind of a baby? To suffer the menstrual cramps and indignity each month, for no earthy reason?

This poor girl is never going to marry or become a mother. She will never have intelligence enough to consent to anything. She will remain a happy, burbling infant, but now she'll be travel-sized for her parents' convenience.

Perhaps that last was uncalled for. But it does express my own murky feelings on the subject. I understand why they did it. I can even argue their point logically. But emotionally? It doesn't sit well. It feels dirty to even think that way, to think about making those kinds of very permanent decisions for another human being, even if it were my own child.

Because I have to wonder... if it's okay to shrink your mentally disabled child so you can always lift her, how far away is it to consider altering other aspects of biology in order to make your child easier to handle? We've already got mass dopings for difficult kids. We make them sit still, make them cooperate... when will we start making them prettier? Smaller? Bigger? Thinner?

And I worry. Because if you'd asked me at age nine, I'd have agreed to anything to keep from reaching this height. I once went to my mother to ask if anyone in this country practiced feet-binding. I was hoping to prevent my own (inevitable) growth into a size eleven shoe. What if my mother had encouraged me? What if she had allowed that? Is mutilation for acceptance that much of a stretch from mutilation for accessibility?

Justice is served. Dessert, anyone?

2006-12-29T22:47:00.000-05:00

It's confetti time in hell.

And frankly, I loved the Fark.com headline. "Saddam Hussein officially starts his homosexual relationship with Satan"

I know. I'm a terrible person. I should be praying for the repose of his soul right now, and instead I'm envisioning the poor fella arriving in hell, disoriented, disappointed, and wondering where his virgins went. Or perhaps since he wasn't really a "religious" man, maybe his soul just crumbled like dust and he got no afterlife at all...

I wonder which would be worse?

A Woman After My Own Heart

2006-12-20T22:36:00.000-05:00

Have y'all read this yet?

One of the dispossessed in the whole Kelo Vs New London fiasco has sent the most thoughtful sort of holiday greeting to those who forced her out of her home (and helped destroy personal property rights in the US.) Apparently the supreme court have yet to recieve their cards, but I do hope she sends them as well. Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer should all choke on their Christmas pudding thinking of what they have done to those poor people, and to the rest of us in time.

You know, with the war, and the usual media scandal du jour, it's easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. But as time goes on, I think we will come to see that Kelo Vs New London was the first step along a disastrous road for our country. I think the judges' statements on the decision will be regarded as perhaps the most wrongheaded bits of legislative fiction in more than a century; the decision itself the equivalent of Dred Scott in warped reasoning, (if Roe V Wade itself doesn't take that dubious honour.)

At any rate, a Merry Christmas to those who fought so hard in a futile attempt to save their homes. And Lord forgive me for hoping that curse carries at least a little weight, and some karma for the guilty.

At least ONE fella in Hollyweird gets it...

2006-12-18T10:45:00.000-05:00

Wow. I feel all weird now. Because at this moment? I'm finding Danny Bonaduce incredibly hot. Having a reasonable amount of sense, the ability to speak coherently, and the balls to put a moonbat in his place, is just downright sexy! Thanks to the Jawa Report for bringing this gem to our attention.

Enviro-wackiness Continues to Ensue...

2006-12-15T07:45:00.000-05:00

Sigh. Take a moment to remember what "Everybody knows." Not too long ago, everybody knew that bad air caused malaria. Everybody knew that you could determine a person's criminality by the bumps on their head. Everybody knew that regular bathing would kill you. Everybody knew that the world was flat. Everybody knew that the brain existed to cool the blood. Everybody knew that demonic possession made you sick, and your neighbour could curse your cow and make it die.

So right now everybody knows that the planet is succumbing to something called Global Warming.

In a hundred years, what will everybody know?

Hot Priests??? Huh?

2006-12-09T16:48:00.000-05:00

Okay. For the record? I have no problem with pretty priests. In fact? I'd probably enjoy mass a little more with a handsome young priest to look at. Purely aesthetics, right? Just as I enjoy beautiful cathedrals and beautiful music, I can see myself definitely appreciating a beautiful priest.

But Blogger AtHomeInRome had such an interesting link up I felt I had to discuss it over here. Because somebody has decided that hot priests, in Priest-of-the-month-format, is the next big thing in calendars.

ooh, boy. I'm not at all sure what I think about this. It seems... unseemly. And yet? I sort of want to look at the rest of the pictures.

I swiped this well timed quote off another blogs comments section...

2006-11-10T07:26:00.000-05:00

""A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear."---Cicero

This is the fear that lurks in my heart, when the optimism begins to fail. That the weaker elements in our society, compounded by the open complicity of the media, have substantially damaged our strength both in the war, and in the world. When I saw This this morning, it made me shake. I cannot hear those words in any context but jihad, anymore. Brutal, bloody jihad that kills innocent Americans.

If and when the next volley comes, will those who gave aid and comfort to the enemy finally feel shame and remorse?

I guess it's too much to expect a little sanity right now...

2006-11-08T21:50:00.000-05:00

Oh, My God. Am I reading this right? Are they really trying to say that Republicans fixed the election- and threw a win to the dems in order to set Repubs up for a cheating win in '08?

Oi. My head hurts just trying to wrap it around liberal groupthink. Someone get me an aspirin or ten.

Some positive thoughts for the day...

2006-11-08T07:23:00.000-05:00

After a good night's rest and a fresh cup of coffee, I'm trying to see the positives in yesterday's elections. And there were positives- the negatives are scary things, involving national security. But let us not forget a few other salient points. Things to be thankful for today:

1. We have now seen, in four separate elections, that every single vote counts. No one should ever feel that "my vote doesn't mean anything" because we are getting closer every time to single digit differences in vote tallies. Your lone vote literally could be the difference in the direction your country takes, on myriad positions.

2. The public gives a damn. Sure, I think most of them were WRONG yesterday- but if the networks were right, then voter turnout was huge. Fewer folks opted out than anybody expected. And in a democracy, that is never a bad thing.

3. The pre-election rumblings of "voter fraud" and "voter intimidation," and the legal teams the democrats were supposedly keeping on standby, are not materialising to make us relive the Florida debacle. Most defeats were handled graciously, without lining up soundbytes and legions of lawyers. I have yet to see my compatriots threatening to relocate to Canada or anywhere else.

4. Many of the newbies on the left side of the aisle campaigned on very conservative positions. There were Pro-life dems, fiscal responsibility dems, even a pro-weapon ownership dem. If their positions were represented honestly, then Ms. Pelosi may find they don't dance to the tune she pipes for them quite so well as she'd like them to.

5. George may finally feel how the administration's leadership has let us down with regards to the immigration issue, and perhaps he'll harden his line against illegals now.

6. We have further evidence the majority of the country supports defending traditional marriage.

It was a bad night for us, no doubt about that. But perhaps the new folks will come up with something useful for us, something beyond "We hate Bush," as a party platform. Hope springs eternal. I have to think that among at least a portion of their party, are a number of people who will take the issue of terrorism seriously, who will recognise that we are in the middle of a war, and that the war must be fought. That the troops must be provisioned, the intelligence funded, the course plotted, and the battle carried through to a victory. It is now their obligation to do so, and perhaps now they can stop shouting about the last two elections long enough to realise that.

What part of "They want to kill us" Don't you Understand? Part Two

2006-11-08T00:40:00.000-05:00

I'm coining a new word tonight: Demmitude. It's the state of being dhimmi by choice.

I'm watching the coverage on television, and I've come to a profound and disappointing realisation... Bin Laden was right about us all along.

That's right. We're soft, we have weak stomachs. We don't like war, and death is unseemly. It makes for nasty soundbytes on tv, and ugly pictures in the paper. We are a peaceful lot, by nature. We like to mind our own business, and keep to ourselves. We don't always keep our word and we lack the gumption to see through difficult tasks. We want to watch American Idol and eat Cheetos and listen to our Ipods and not have to think about ugliness in the rest of the world. Tell us nice things, like you're moderate and you love America, and we'll believe anything. Tell us scary things, and we'll throw you out of office. We don't like being scared. Much more comfortable not to look at the bad pictures or talk about the scary things.

Do you think that the Romans knew what was coming, as they paid their money to the waves of barbarian hordes? Did they foresee their end? Or did they think, "It's only money, and we've got plenty of it. We'll buy their friendship and they'll leave us in peace." How long was it, in human terms, between an international empire, and complete subjugation? One lifetime? Two?

Incessant whining on the daily news has taken its toll. The public is tired of war. We don't want to watch it, or read it, or hear about it. Round the clock coverage has given us all ennui. And we've long since become immune to the mudslinging of political ads. And the war is so far away. Who really cares what happens in places we can hardly find on a map, to people with names we can't begin to pronounce?

Yes, I know, the final counts are not in yet. It does not matter; these races should never even have been close.

I hear Ms. Pelosi assures us the dems won't try to cut funding to the war, at least not immediately. That's nice. Reassuring, isn't it, that they aren't going to turn off the supplies and money first thing in the morning? I'm sure our boys dying in the desert are going to be so relieved to hear that they'll still have bullets in their guns for a few weeks. Nevermind the targets we've just painted on their backs for our enemies.

I am disgusted. Because we cannot be isolationists in the modern world, as much as we might like to. The islamofascists will never leave us alone. They will scent the weakness on this country like blood on the cattle that they think we are. And they will move in for the kill.

If the dems have their way and we pull out of Iraq, then we will have delivered a clear message to those who want to kill us. It is an engraved invitation to another 9/11, more bombed embassies and ships, more hijackings, and more beheaded Americans abroad. When Bush1 pulled out after the Gulf War, he left our allies to be slaughtered and dumped like garbage into mass graves. Hussein is one part on a multiheaded hydra; we cut him out and more grew in his place. They will carry on his atrocities. And anyone who has helped us fight this war has a deathmark. When we leave, they are as good as dead. We promised our soldiers and our allies that we would stand by them, we would support them.

And every vote for the democrats today was a vote not to keep our word. It was a vote for Sharia law.

Appeasement never works. You cannot negotiate with terrorists. They want us dead, or in subjugation.

2006-11-07T16:09:00.000-05:00

My friend Cyndi sent me this link just now. The original is broke, but here's google's cache. http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:Qu5wMpEIpkYJ:www.dansimmons.com/news/message/2006_04.htm+dan+simmons+%22Time+Traveler%22&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&strip=1

Despite the fact this was posted in April, I'd never read it. Wow. Just- Wow. Good piece. I'm shaking a little.

Now I want to read more of this guy.

Friends don't let friends vote Democrat....

2006-11-07T13:42:00.000-05:00

I've just come back from doing my civic duty. I hope everyone reading this did so as well. If you didn't vote today, I don't want to hear diddly squat from you in the months to come about how the congresscritters are "ruining the country."

Nobody is ruining anything. Democracy is messy business, all those differing opinions demanding equal time and discussion. But equal time is not equivalence; indeed, some of those opinions are more valuable than others. He who screams the loudest is not always the most important, honest. And perhaps the least valuable opinion of all belongs to he who couldn't be bothered to collect his identification and show up at the polling place today. Okay, scratch that. It probably belongs to he who showed up, but still couldn't fill out his damn ballot.

A little not-so-common sense for y'all on election day. Part of me wants to cut 'n paste this link's contents into an email to every leftwing, bleeding heart, liberal friend in my address book. Nice folks, my friends. Good people, sweet people... but in some cases, damnably wrongheaded, impractical people. But I think I know what would happen if I did that. They'd see "Political linkage from the Ornithophobe, " and think, "Poor Ornithophobe- she didn't go to college. This is what happens to smart girls who don't go to college. They wind up in a Red State, raising babies, and never amount to much." And then most of them would hit delete, sight unseen.

Because every argument, every bumpersticker tag line discussed in that blog entry- I've seen them before. I've read them almost daily, in the journals and blogs and on the backs of the bumpers of so many of my friends. And whenever I see that, when I read "Bush Lied, People Died" and "No Blood For Oil," I wonder- do they really believe that stuff? Have they ever sat down, and picked through the idea logically, looking for evidence of truth or falsehood? Have they ever even ASKED a soldier who has served in Iraq, what goes on there? What we're doing there? What do they think really happened on 9/11 and have they ever considered the fates of our supporters after we pulled out of Iraq under Bush 1? Do they even give a thought to the allies we left to be plowed under into mass graves all over the country? Do they watch the news and see the same things I see every night? Have they yet realised, will they EVER realise, that militant Islam is at war with the whole world?

Or are their politics another bloodless, murky idea, that they picked up at University? Another bit of intellectual masturbation, an unproductive mental release that doesn't generate anything of substance? A bit of social affectation that doesn't really have an impact on their everyday lives?

I know without a doubt that our everyday lives will feel it, in a million ways, if the democrats have their way and pull us out of Iraq before we achieve a comprehensive victory and lasting regime change there. I don't know about you, but I'm not much looking forward to Sharia Law and wearing a burka, no matter how great I look in black. And that environment they're all so worried about won't fare particularly well if too many whackjobs get hold of nukes. Nuclear Winter is bad for the environment, y'all. It kills trees and little woodland creatures and other growing things. Of course, on the plus side, it'd probably clean up that whole "global warming" problem...

What part of "They Want to Kill Us" don't you understand?

2006-11-04T14:12:00.000-05:00

This is a PSA. Please make time to watch "Obsession" on Fox News Saturday or Sunday. It is required viewing for an educated electorate. In the meantime, head over to the website and look at a few trailers, or read some of the press kit stuff.

I know it's easy and comfortable to fall into old patterns, to blame and mock and enjoy politics as a sport. I know I do it. But this election is about much more than who gets to decorate what in Washington. We cannot afford to forget what is at stake here. It is no less than the future of Western Civilisation itself.

If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is there to hear it....

2006-11-04T04:06:00.000-05:00

The story that nobody in the mainstream media is talking about. Why is this not on CNN and Foxnews nonstop?

Ah, yes. Because there are smutty stories and stupid politician tricks to discuss, instead.

More murdered babies

2006-11-03T06:59:00.000-05:00

There must be something in the air, or the water. Lately, it's all about the babies. The murdered babies, alas.

I suppose that if you're hired to abort a baby, there must be some pressure to provide a dead one at the end of the "procedure." It can't be good for business when they come out pink and breathing, after all.

Holy mother, bless the souls of the innocent who die today. And every day. Amen.

2006-11-01T07:21:00.000-05:00

Just in case you've been living under a rock for the past few days.

Yeah. I'm so glad this man was not elected president. Oh, boy. Can he really be that dim? For what it's worth, The Ornithophobe was not a first class student. She made abysmal grades. She does not purport to be even remotely well educated about most subjects.

And yet, even I know better than to say something so stupid. Poor John. Open mouth, insert foot, insert other foot, and land on ass. He's backpedalling now, but it's comically painful to watch.

And another goody from the religion of pieces. Pray for the souls of the martyrs. If you can, pray for the souls of their killers, too. Myself, I'm not nearly a good enough Christian to do that, but I'm working on it.

It's only Murder when it's not done by the mother?

2006-10-29T15:01:00.000-05:00

Clearly I need to spend more time reading blogs. Because somehow I missed this last week.

A Virginia court has decided that it's okay for a woman to murder her baby during labor. That's right. Third trimester, when it's typically illegal to kill an unborn baby. Unless you're its mother, apparently. There was no antiseptic doctor's office, there was no "medical procedure" euphemism... there was only a bullet fired into her abdomen as labor commenced. A child was murdered in a parking lot by its "mother" and the state has seen fit to call this an "abortion." And despite the fact that third trimester abortions are supposed to be illegal there, this one is okay. That's right. It's okay to "abort" your baby in the third trimester, in Virginia, if the means implemented are a pistol in a parking lot.

This hideous woman, this wretched excuse for a human being, is raising two other children. My first thought is for them, not their poor murdered sibling. Because what does it say to you, to know that your mother killed your sib? I wonder, were they looking forward to the new baby? Did she have a nursery set up, had she let any of them feel the baby move? What did it mean to them when Mommy left, not to go to the hospital, but to kill one of their number?

If there is any justice in this world, the state will remove both of them from her care, and some kind family will raise them as their own. Because these children have no mother. No mother would do this awful thing. As her baby moved inside her, preparing to be born into this world, she shot it dead.

She is evil. She is unholy and rotten to her core, and should have spent the remainder of her life in a prison cell. What she did should be unacceptable to any thinking, feeling human being. That we even have to discuss whether what she did was a crime, is a sign of how far our society has fallen into the Culture of Death and Murder.

How can she walk the streets of her town, when people know what she has done? Does anyone speak to her? Look at her? Or do they cross the street to avoid contact with someone so horribly inhumane?

Because I would. I would have to avoid her, if only to avoid the temptation to spit upon her.

May she never ever cross my path. Because I lack the compassion of my faith; I cannot find it in my heart to pray for her, only for her babies.

Teh Left must hate teh Babies...

2006-10-25T16:49:00.000-04:00

The Anchoress knocked it out of the park again, as usual.

Micheal J. Fox is prostituting himself and his condition to lie to the public. I'm not going to be PC and say, "oh, what a shame, poor Micheal." He's pissing me off. He is LYING to us, and we're all supposed to just let it slide because he's sick. Well, I'm not letting it slide.

Let's go over this one more time, shall we? Thus far, the only successful stem cell treatments have involved Adult Stem Cells. Early reports to the contrary have been subsequently shown to involve patient death and worsening conditions, or to be outright frauds. All questions as to the morality of ESC treatment aside, it's not a success, folks, when it leaves the patient with worse symptoms than before treatment began. It's definitely not a success when it kills the patient.

No one in their right mind opposes adult stem cell research. Fox's deceptive tactics conflate one type of research with the other, confusing a public too apathetic or lazy to do their own damn research. This is not accidental, this is intentional, and it's immoral and intellectually dishonest.

Incidentally, Fox's Parkinson's case is intriguing for an altogether different reason. I had to google to find it, but I did recall watching a program that discussed potential environmental factors in his condition. That program may have been "The Parkinson's Enigma," a Canadian documentary about Parkinson's clusters. (Fox and several other coworkers on a late seventies Canadian sitcom all contracted Parkinson's early, in a strange statistical anomaly.) If it turns out to be a preventable condition, whether disease or brain injury, then research into this area could put a stop to all of the squabbling over what stem cells are acceptable to use in treatment.

But the left will probably still want to chop up baby bits for research, you know that, don't you? I don't even pretend to understand why. There must be something threatening about any form of research that doesn't involve getting government funding to slice'n'dice baby bits for your lab...

This made me weep...

2006-10-06T01:24:00.000-04:00

In an act of ultimate Christian charity, Amish leaders have set aside a portion of the funds donated by a sympathetic public, to help provide for the family of the man who murdered their little girls. Apparently, the hand of friendship has been extended to the nutjob's widow, and forgiveness extended to the nutjob himself.

I am awed, I am humbled. I can only admire what I do not possess. I don't think I would have it in me to forgive someone that way. There is too much anger, too much vindictiveness, in me. I harbor grudges. I am filled with the sin of pride, and the thirst for vengeance when I am wronged. I engage in schadenfreude from time to time, when the opportunity presents itself. I am not a very good Christian. I want to be, but I sin and fall short, time and again.

Every time one of these psychos goes and kills a bunch of people- going all the way back to the Standard Gravure thing when I was a child- I entertain notions of packing up, and moving out to the country. I think about how much safer I'd feel, and how much more simple and peaceful things would be, with fewer neighbours and a more rural setting. I allow myself the fantasy of raising my boys in more traditional, more nurturing, surroundings.

My mental safety net is shattered. If the Amish ain't safe, ain't nobody safe.

I can only marvel in wonder at the amazing goodness being displayed by these folks. They are living the example of Christian love, living their faith in a very visible and moving way. I wish I was more like them.

The Good, the Bad... and the Pervy

2006-10-04T12:46:00.000-04:00

So Mark Foley is a perv. We're all pretty much in agreement on that, right? So let's start from there. The man made inappropriate overtures to minors via email and instant message. And by 'inappropriate' I mean lewd and repulsive, the sort of overtures one typically makes to paid strangers in the dead of night, for 3.99 a minute or something.

But let us examine things more closely. Hastert claims republican leaders were only made aware of the one email, the first message 'leaked' to the media. This would be the "how ya doing after the hurricane, can I get a recent picture?" email. Which is ... weird, but not vulgar. And apparently Foley was told this sort of chumminess with the pages just didn't look well, and would he please not do it again? Gingrich points out that anything beyond that might have been taken for homophobia, for an attack on Foley as a gay man. So congressional leaders treaded softly for fear of being un-pc. How lovely. How very enlightened and thoughtful. Not.

So where did the five years or so of lewd IMs come from? Who held onto them for this long? Why did they not come forward? Surely they weren't holding them for an October Surprise! Why that would be... unthinkable. Immoral. And hey, possibly illegal.

So now Foley is claiming the liquor made him do it. That or the priests. Would this guy go away already? It's past time he fell on his sword. Or ate the end of a pistol.

Now let's think for a moment about the boys he conversed with. The ones who talked about their girlfriends, and measured their parts for him. Do you ever wonder what they must have thought amongst themselves? Did they think the guy was a great big joke? A skeezy, dirty old man? Did they avoid him, did they fear him, did they think that by flirting with him a little, they could get ahead in Washington? So now is there a new twist on being "gay for pay?"

I don't think Mark Foley is a pedophile. He clearly is interested in postpubescent, adolescent males. This, by definition, makes him gay. Just a really skeezy, grotesque sort of gay. The sort of gay the homosexual lobby don't want the rest of us to think about. Which is sad. Because you can't judge all gay people by one dirty old man. That'd be like judging all heterosexuals by the actions of one William Jefferson Clinton. Shudder.

And I think focussing on "pedophilia" actually does us a disservice here. The issue isn't Kiddy-touching, it's abuse of power and the subsequent cover up- by whomever did the covering. If it was members of my own, beloved, Republican party- I want heads to roll. If it was people hoping to damage us in the coming elections? I still want heads to roll. And either way, if we can prove someone knew about this and did not come forward? There ought to be charges involved. This perv was permitted to carry on in this manner for YEARS... a crime could have been prevented, and was not, most likely for political gain. Somebody needs to go to prison for that.

Conversion Stories

2006-10-02T14:33:00.000-04:00

I always enjoy reading conversion stories on other people's blogs. In 2001 I was asked to give a speech during mass, detailing my experience with RCIA. I wrote the piece below at Deacon Charles' request, and I delivered it with shaking hands and an uneven voice. But afterward I had numerous people come up to me and tell me how moved they were. One lady even asked for a copy of it, to show her son, who had fallen away from the Church. Anyway... I have been toying with the idea of writing up my conversion story for this site, for some time. Today I realised, I already have that story- all I need do is post the speech. It says everything I want it to say.

"Looking For God In All the Wrong Places,"- speech by the Ornithophobe, August, 2001.

Hello. My name is (deleted for privacy) and Deacon Wayne has asked that I speak to you today about my experience of the RCIA program here at Our Lady. I consider it both an honor, and a privilege, to do so.

I am still in my neophyte year- I was baptized and confirmed this past Easter. It was the culmination, I thought, of a lifelong dream, the dream of belonging to God, of feeling at one with Him and with His Church. I now realize it was merely the first step of many, in a never-ending commitment to follow Christ, and his teachings.

I was a Catechumen; an unbaptised querant into the rituals, and doctrine of our catholic faith. My family background was a hodgepodge of Christian traditions, punctuated by infrequent attendence in churches of one denomination and another. I grew up saying grace and bedtime prayers, and learned to sing “Jesus Loves Me.” We had rosaries in the house but no one prayed them.

I was never baptized. Despite the efforts of well-meaning neighbors, shepherding me to and from Vacation Bible School, and Sunday School, it never happened. I never quite made that long, arduous trek down the aisle to Get Saved and Get Dunked. And no, Jesus himself never reached down from heaven and gave me that shove- Besides, it was so awfully PUBLIC. To Go stand up, before all of those people, and do something so intensely personal? I am just not that bold.

Not that I didn’t WANT to do it. I wanted it desperately. I wanted to feel His presence, in His house. I just never could.

I began services here in 1997. On Easter Sunday. I went for three weeks. Then, in 1998, I did it again. Easter Sunday, and for a couple of weeks after. Some people make new year’s resolutions; Apparently mine coincide with Easter.

Last year my son started Prekindergarten here, and I came to the realization that if I didn’t make a place for our family here at church, then my boys could both grow up with that same emptiness that I had. The idea seemed divinely inspired- I thought that if I went through RCIA, then my kids could be “cradle catholics” in the truest sense, living and breathing their faith throughout their whole lives. They’d never have that feeling that they didn’t belong in Church, And Maybe- Just maybe, they’d never question the presence of God there either. And I thought that perhaps, if they never questioned it, then He’d be there, for them. At the beginning in RCIA, I was doing it for them. As for me- I’d rather given up on feeling God’s presence on Sunday morning. Id stopped thinking it was the churches, and started thinking maybe it was really me- I started too late, I couldn’t feel comfortable in church, Whatever- I just knew that I was spiritually Colorblind- Everyone else obviously felt fine, So the problem lay with Me.

I began the classes here on Wednesday nights, not too long after he started School. Every
day, he’d go off with his backpack, and every Wedneday, I’d go off with my Binder. I wanted everybody to like me, so I bought them off with Food. If I brought Cake, everyone would think that I was nice and nobody’d suspect I couldn’t find God in church. I took meticulous notes in class, read a lot of supplemental material, and even answered all those little discussion questions on the handouts. I tried to spend a lot of time in prayer, and in meditation. Was I doing the right thing? I honestly didn’t know, half the time.

I asked lots of questions, and hoped I was arriving at the right answers.

I went dutifully to mass, too. Although I always felt very strange when everyone would go up to receive holy communion on Sundays. A little ashamed,too, hiding in my seat, wishing no one would notice me or that I wouldn’t have to get up and draw attention to myself to let my neighbor out of the pew. But, humiliation or no, I went, most every week. I threw myself into my studies, determined to get the most I could get out of the process.

Christmas Eve I went to midnight mass. I was exhausted, having been up almost 24 hours straight dealing with gifts and festivities and family visits. The holiday season is always a mess for me,as I’m sure it is for many of you, with Baking and Christmas Cards and about a blue million relatives. But I made time to come listen to the beautiful music, and to pray. And as I prayed, I felt renewed, and calm. I didn’t get to sleep until very late Christmas morning, after Santa came at our house- But I didn’t feel tired.

As the Lenten Season Began, I was really looking forward to being taken into full communion with the Church. Not just so my kids could have a Catholic Home, but for my own sake. I was suddenly very excited about it, full of energy and joy. I had this sense that something mystical and wonderful was about to happen to me. I was in a good mood no one could shoot down. I think my Cynical-side was on vacation through most of April. I became Relentlessly “Chipper”. I decided to throw myself a Baptismal Party. So what if I’m a grownup? All the kids in my family who got christened had parties- I made myself a gorgeous cake to celebrate, and I went out and I bought a hat. I invited my whole family. I made my Husband promise to attend- and he’s not seen the inside of a church since our Wedding Day. My poor, aged Mamau, who is on Oxygen and Never Leaves the house, came. Despite her Baptist upbringing and thinking Im a hellbound Papist. My mother came, though I had a hard time convincing her that it was okay to wear slacks, and that no one would pin a napkin to her head if she didn’t wear a hat. She not only came, but she cried happy tears for me. My Uncle Came, my kids came- and they made me “Happy Baptism” cards. Mrs. Layman, My sponsor, Stood right up here next to me as God took me in and made me his own. It was one of the most beautiful, most profound moments of my entire life.

I finally feel like I belong here on Sunday mornings. When I take holy communion I am part of something larger than just this building, just this congregation- I am genuinely part of the body of Christ. I am united through His Body and His Blood with Christians across the globe, and with all of those throughout history who have shared our traditions and our faith. I know most of you have been able to feel part of that closeness for a long while- but for me, the newness hasn’t worn off yet- I’m still bowled over by it every Sunday, by that perfect moment when we are all one.

In summation I could enumerate the things I learned in RCIA; I could pray rote prayers, discuss church history, Church Doctrine, Biblical Symbolism, and our lovely stained glass windows! But you can learn all that yourself by coming to the classes this fall. But RCIA is about Formation as much as it is Information. It is the art of making brand-new Catholics. I’ve just shared with you how God, and the church, made me.

Yeah, it's the Daily Show. So? I still think it's funny...

2006-09-21T07:17:00.000-04:00

The complete idiot's guide to net neutrality.

"Mawage. Mawage is wot bwings us togeder tooday. Mawage, that bwessed awangment, that dweam wifin a dweam..."

2006-09-20T18:16:00.000-04:00

Everybody's already covered the Pope's citation and the subsequent Muslim outrage. I'm too late to the party to deal with that. But, fear not, Gentle Reader... I'm going to hit upon it in a more roundabout way.

Today, I want to talk about Marriage. And while there are endless words to be said about the subject as it exists in my own country, today I want to discuss Marriage as it exists somewhere else.

Nikah Misyar, the Traveller's Marriage, is an option practiced under Sharia law in Muslim countries. In this arrangement, a man and woman are legally 'married' but the man has no responsiblities to this wife. He may visit her, in her parents' home, at any time he wishes. But he owes her no financial responsibility, no home of her own. He may contract such a marriage irrespective of other, traditional marriages he has made. The first, second, third, and fourth wives do not have to approve of the Misyar bride; they do not even have to be informed that the misyar marriage has occurred.

My search of the web has turned up numerous people looking to contract such 'marriages' all over the globe. It has also turned up something more interesting: the opinions of Muslims the world over. It seems that 'no respectable woman would consent to such a marriage.' Most often, Misyar marriages are a last, desperate hope for widows, spinsters, and girls living in abject poverty. Often they are hoping the misyar marriage will somehow become a real one.

But wait! It gets better!

Nikah Mut'ah is a temporary marriage! In this arrangement, a couple agrees to marry, but with a fixed termination point. The husband has no obligations to provide for the wife, or live with her. A maximum of four temporary wives can be taken, in addition to the maximum four true wives under Islamic law.

The apparent purpose of both these forms of "marriage" is to allow men to copulate with women, without responsibility (beyond the financial support of offspring, that is) and without the sin of Zina, fornication.

This is good, since Zina tends to result in little girls and women of all ages being stoned to death or hanged. Isn't it lovely that Allah's One True Pedophile was so thoughtful as to provide us with this alternative?

I could now go on at length about the apparent hypocrisy in a culture that abhors the decadence of the west, while crafting nifty 'marriage' definitions that put a new face on the old sin of prostitution. But I won't.

Because I honestly have to ask, how do Misyar and Mutah differ all that much from the customs of our own country? Every day, women enter into relationships in the hope that they will end in marriage. Young girls give their bodies in hopes of getting love, in exchange for sex. Like their sisters in the Muslim world, they hope, often vainly, that if they are just good enough in bed, and kind enough out of it; if they work well enough, forgive easily enough... if they just try HARD enough, the boyfriend will metamorph into the ultimate status symbol: The husband. Because even after the "sexual revolution," after decades of women having the vote- after women's lib, ERA, RoeVWade, the pill, "Having it all"... after all of this, women still want husbands. Feminism hasn't managed to eradicate that biological drive for safe pairbonding.

But at no time in history has there been less incentive for a man to marry. He no longer needs to do so in order to find sex. He doesn't even need it for the production of legitimate heirs; as illegitimacy has become passe'. He can have his bachelor abode, and his bachelor life, and send out his laundry and take out his meals. When the urge for sexual gratification overwhelms him, he can boot up his computer and enjoy a wide variety of pornography. Or he can head out into the world and, without much difficulty, find a willing woman to warm his bed for a night. nevitably, he knows some man who can (and will) tell him horror stories about divorce court, alimony, and court ordered child support. Understandably, he may not look at the women he dates as potential mates; he looks at them as potential adversaries or a resource to be exploited.

And most of those women are hoping, just like their Muslim counterparts, to find "true love." They're mortgaging "right now" for a shot at "til death do us part." "Pleasure Marriages" and "Sleeping Together" are morally equivalent, and equally disrespectful of the institution itself. They deprive men, women, and children, of the most basic and vital aspects of the human pairbond, substituting mere physical union for a deeper, more spiritual one.

Bizarro World- Ornithophobe tries on liberal groupthink for a moment.

2006-07-19T19:25:00.000-04:00

So let me get this straight- we're only in support of stem-cell research when it kills embryonic babies, right? I know, I know- but it gets so confusing. I mean, the only stem cell trials that have actually KILLED anybody so far involved embryonic stem cells. And the only successful uses of stem cell research so far have involved ADULT stem cells. But it's very important to preserve the right to harvest baby bits. It's a matter of "choice", y'know. Our bodies, ourselves, and all that. Oh, wait- there is no ban on using embryonic stem cells in research? There's only been a ban on using taxpayer funds to do it? You can still hire someone to cut up baby bits for your research if you want to pay for it?

The "Alternative Pluripotent Stem Cell Therapies Enhancement Act" (the bill to sponsor alternative stem cell research-that doesn't actually KILL anybody, born or unborn) was sponsored by Santorum and Spector, an unlikely combination under any circumstances. The efforts to defeat it were led by republican Mike Castle, who shames his party by helping to sponsor a bill that would spend my money and yours on embryonic stem cell research. You know, research that kills babies. And teenagers. And apparently will injure/kill lots of other people. (See "Medical risks of embryonic stem cells (including ES cells in TC) " about halfway down this page. )

Wow. Unless I had read about this stuff online, I would never have known any of that.

A little dignity, please?

2006-05-17T19:54:00.000-04:00

http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=424003

I understand the purpose of the exercise. The teachers in question were hoping to help straight students better understand and accept their homosexual counterparts. It's a noble gesture, and a kind thought. I have issues with whether or not one can "educate" or "enlighten" by subjecting students to what can only be classified as sexual harrassment. But other, better blogs have dealt with that aspect of the story. I prefer to deal with this one:

Asking people very personal, intimate questions, is RUDE.

We used to know this. You would no more ask someone how they know they liked guy bits, than you would ask a lady how much she weighs. At one time, there were limits on what was socially acceptable. The discussion of deeply personal, private affairs, was limited to ones mate, and the closest, most intimate friendships in ones life. A new bride might discuss her wedding night with her best friend, her husband, and in rare instances, maybe her mother. The only quizzes on the subject might be filled out furtively in the pages of a Cosmo magazine.

But she'd be unlikely to discuss the matter in a public, classroom forum, with her teachers and her classmates. Even today, such raw, personal frankness is unlikely to be warranted amongst certain levels of society. I did not grow up particularly well-off, nor did I grow up in a ghetto. But no one I grew up with would have ever had a friendly chat about their sexual predilections in a high school classroom. It was not done.

Of course, most of us would never have felt the need to march down Main street in a purple thong, groping our significant other, either. Most of us do not need to identify ourselves by our sexual history and choice of partners. Ones worth and value is predicated upon more concrete things- family, religious affiliation, community ties, employment capacity, and the magnitude of one's own character. But across the board, a certain segment of humanity now revels in matters once too ugly to discuss in polite society. It's an entire substrata of our culture. One afternoon watching daytime talk shows is enough to illustrate this; indeed you can turn on Maury Povich and see scores of women shamelessly declaring that they've bedded so many men they can't account for the parentage of their children. You can take a seat on a park bench in any town and overhear the coarsest of language coming out of adolescent mouths. You can spend an afternoon in your county courthouse and see no end of men being charged for making unsupported babies with women they never had any intent to marry. And even nice people, decent people- who would never discuss their own sex life in public- will speak frankly about birth control, venereal disease, and the lewd sexuality of others. Their own pecadilloes need never see the light of day, but their eyes glint enthusiastically speculating about celebrity bastards and Who Might Have Died From Aids.

We as a society have lost all sense of decorum. We need to rediscover the virtue of personal dignity, to stop poking our noses into everyone else's business, and to stop airing dirty linen in public- our own dirty linen, and anyone else's. Who you sleep with and why, should be of interest to only yourself, and your lover. Everyone else's concern about it can only be prurient, and demeaning.

With apologies to Mr. Frost

2006-05-09T16:13:00.000-04:00

I have simply GOT to make a point of posting more frequently in this thing. I have this niggling fear at the back of my mind that one day, I'll go to put something up and find that the gods of the internet have repossessed my blogspace for inactivity. I'll find one of those "your domain here" sites, or perhaps some hideous porn with small rodents or somesuch.

But I did have a point when I sat down today, I'm certain I did. Ah, yes. There it is- wandering the outer fringes of the Ornithophobe's head, like some nasty bird looking for an inconvenient place to spatter a windshield. You know, for all that I support gun rights wholeheartedly- I'm scared to death of them, wouldn't want one in my control. Perhaps that's because I suspect I'd go off half-cocked (excuse the expression) one morning and blow away some obnoxious little songbird that doesn't respect that SOME people have nocturnal schedules.

But I digress. What I wanted to talk about today, is the border problem. Depending on where you live (or what side of the political fence you sit) they are "illegal aliens" or "undocumented workers" or even "Jose', my pool guy, and Senora Sanchez my babysitter." No, actually, make that "Senora Sanchez, my nanny." Babysitters tend to be employed by people who can't afford to hire pool guys, I think. And their names tend to be things like Brittany, Staci, or Beth.

Many years ago I worked as a babysitter/nanny for a wealthy couple. Both parents were veterinarians, one of whom worked exclusively with thoroughbred racehorses. My days were spent in laundry, cooking, dishwashing, and games of "got your nosey!" with two small children. I sometimes worked twelve hour days, six days a week, without overtime pay, for less than minimum wage. I did so for cash, off the books, without paying into any federal programs.

I was a teenager. I had all the time in the world, and it was good money for someone with no skills beyond playing with babies.

Don't tell me that illegals are taking jobs American citizens won't do, because I've done more than one of them.

"Something there is, that doesn't love a wall." I think it's inside of us all, this unsettled feeling about walling things out, and walling things in. It makes us uneasy. Nobody likes the ugliness of a fence, no one likes saying "you stay on your side and I'll keep to mine." No, we're a gregarious society, contentious and involved and sometimes downright nosey. Everyone wants to know everbody else's business, and at the heart of it all, no one wants to feel alone. We like to think we're "social" and "sociable," a nation of warmhearted, welcoming people. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. "

But the wretched refuse is getting three deep in parts of this country. And make no mistake, some of it IS refuse. I speak not of honest, hardworking, decent people who come here to become citizens in the legal fashion. I speak of the gang members, the bums, the criminals, and the like: those who could never hope to get in by legal methods. And our ability to take care of our own is threatened by these people and their get. California hospitals spent 500 million providing emergency care to illegals last year. The federal government only kicked in for 70 million of that. Guess who paid the rest?

Well it certainly wasn't Mexico.

Guest Workers are a misnomer- they will be a minimally employed underclass who will move money out of our economy and into Mexico's. Citizenship conveyed by birthplace is impractical in a world where a short walk across an invisible line is the difference between AFDC benefits and the inherent corruption of the Mexican government.

I like the Hispanic culture. I read spanish better than I speak it, but I can get by anywhere I need to. I've celebrated Dia de los Muertos, and I make some damn fine sopapillas. I've slogged through everything from Cervantes to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Ask me about my Shakira records.

But you'll forgive me if I think that Good Fences make Good Neighbors.

Biblical historicity goodness...

2006-02-19T23:45:00.001-05:00

I clearly don't read enough jargon-y scientific journals. Because somehow I missed out on new evidence supporting the validity of the Shroud of Turin.

If you can get through the more complex terminology in the faq, I highly recommend that too. Fascinating stuff.

Seen in another blog's comments section...

2006-02-15T18:09:00.000-05:00

"I'd rather go hunting with Dick Cheney than ride with Ted Kennedy."

I need say nothing more, I'm in total agreement.

The Tech-Savvy Congresscritter...

2006-02-01T18:11:00.000-05:00

This is SUCH a great idea!

Okay... So they make more money than God. I know they can afford their own Ipods. But frankly, so many of our legislators are a trifle, erm... elderly. They're set in their ways, they dislike change. And the only folks that have their ear right now are the MPAA and the RIAA.

We need to change that.

Ipods are so simple a child can work them. My nine year old mastered the intricacies of Podkayne (my own Ipod Photo) in a matter of minutes, without a booklet, an FAQ, or a tutorial. Put one of these babies into the hands of every senator, every representative, and they may finally understand what is at stake, what vital technical advances these corporate behemoths hope to quash and stifle.

I'm thinking bake sale. We can call it "Buy Congress a Clue" and we'll have little napster-head icons iced onto the cupcakes. Oooh. And those little circle-slash logo thingies around RIAA and MPAA? We'll put those on the cookies...

I could get entirely too excited about this.

Spoiled Brats at the International Table

2006-01-28T13:06:00.000-05:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4657528.stm

There is something fundamentally wrong with any person or group of persons, benefitting from anothers largesse, being unable or unwilling to express a modicum of gratefulness. The problem begins with arrogance and an attitude of unjust entitlement.

You see it every day, it's become a common theme. People who just expect the world (or their more productive neighbours) to do for them. From the arrogance and ingratitude of people on the dole, collecting welfare, or begging on streetcorners, to class warfare rhetoric in our politics. The same rude cause that is at work when a teenager kills for another kid's shoes. "He had it, I wanted it, I'm entitled to it. It should be MINE." And this attitude is never pretty, and is largely responsible for the worst violent excesses in human history: the Terror in revolutionary France, the Holocaust in WW2 Europe, the elimination of the native populations in our own US history. It's always about wanting something you didn't earn, and feeling entitled to take it from somebody who did.

So imagine then that some of those people who have what you want, decide to give you some of it. Not all of it, but a portion. And they hand it to you free of charge. "Here, it's a gift."

Would you be grateful? Touched? How would you feel about your benefactor?

If you're one of those productive people I was talking about earlier, you would be thankful. Perhaps you might be made to think kindly of your patron, and wish to do good for them. At the very least you might wish to curry favor with someone so generous, in order to keep the handouts coming.

But unfortunately, if you're one of those NOT productive people, people who are accustomed to taking what doesn't belong to them, and living off the work of others... in that case? You're not going to be grateful. You're going to be surly.

"I deserve it anyway. I deserve all of it, and you should have none."

You will resent and hate your benefactor, because nothing breeds contempt so much as a sense of your own unworthiness. And prolonged acceptance of charity does nothing but encourage that sense. It reminds you you cannot achieve on your own. You're not good enough, bright enough, strong enough. In desperation to retain your dignity, you begin looking for excuses why you cannot be productive. It cannot be YOU, so it must be THEM. And then, it becomes necessary to hate those who have and do what you cannot. It's a survival mechanism, the need to break the world down into "Mine" and "Other," into Us and Them. The haves, vs. the Have-nots.

The way to fix this problem is to stop throwing money at the spoiled brats who won't do for themselves. To stop treating them like children and force them to act like adults.

And in the realm of international politics, we have done part of that. The Palestinians have chosen a government. The will of the people has spoken, and they've voted themselves a shiteload of disaster. Like recalcitrant children, they've opted for the entitlement mentality. A people gets the government it deserves, and this bloodthirsty lot have got exactly what they wanted.

Let them choke on it for awhile. It may force them to grow up.

But the worst thing in the world we can do is try to monkey with their decisions. "Be good, or we'll take away the money." This disrespects the will of a fledgeling populace attempting, ever so painfully, to govern itself. And this is OUR highhanded arrogance, the arrogance of the western world- that we think we can solve the world's problems for them. We're often like the well meaning older brother who keeps picking up after our siblings and fighting their battles for them. In the end, all it does is raise a weak younger sibling who resents us for everything we never let him do for himself.

Sometimes people- and societies- simply need to make their own mistakes.

The first step is to Stop. Giving. Them. Money. How hard is this? Take every backward western-world hating culture and STOP FUNDING THEM! They don't appreciate it. It doesn't give us their good will. Look at the wording in that article. "BLACKMAIL," Haniya calls it. There is no appreciation for charity, only malice to the giver.

We cannot make their decisions for them. But neither should we support them in their foolishness. There is no kindness in that.

Diamonds are Forever

2005-10-08T19:54:00.000-04:00

Man made diamonds! Whee!

I love stories like this one. Anything that knocks the DeBeers monopoly on its collective arse makes me smile. I've followed the
stories of Gemesis and Apollo for about three years now, and personally? I can't wait to buy my first cultured diamond-conflict-safe, blood-free, and flawless.

Synthetic diamonds... that sounds so awful. I prefer the "cultured diamond" term. After all, they ARE diamonds- chemically and physiologically. Only nobody died or was mutilated to get them to market, and their price will be market dictated, rather than the result of some monopolistic cartel.

The ornithophobe, she likes the sparkly; oh yes she does. I've got a nice collection of shiny diamonds and emeralds (as emeralds are my favourite stone) and I wear them daily. But years ago, I realised I was not so interested in where my stone came from- not nearly so much as I was in what it looked like. The result was my one carat man made emerald solitaire. I love this thing. I looked everywhere for a "natural" emerald ring with this level of colour and clarity. It did not exist for less than ten thousand dollars. Yet for about six hundred, I could have perfect dark green shimmer, surrounded by tiny diamonds, in fourteen karat gold - If I was willing to accept a manufactured emerald. Well- duh! Sign me up, baby! I embrace the wonders of the technological age!

For me, jewelry is not investment, it is ornament. I know my diamonds aren't worth much to a pawnbroker. I buy shinies because I LIKE shinies. I like colour, and glitter, and shimmer. And for years I've sated my guilt about the evils of the diamond trade and indulged my passion for the past at the same time, by buying used, buying vintage. And along the way? I discovered something. I don't LIKE modern diamonds. I don't like brilliant cuts, don't care for the spartan settings. I hate white gold, and platinum. I like the softer glow of old diamonds. But most of all, I love the ornate filigree and dainty delicacy of victorian, the interesting shapes and designs of deco. I positively LOVE antique jewelry. I love that when someone notices the rings on my fingers, and they inevitably go, "Wherever did you find that?"... that I can smugly say "It's vintage. It's antique." I love that I never run into anyone else wearing the same jewelry I have on.

You can walk into any jeweler in the country and find exactly the same styles of jewelry in each one. Open a bridal magazine and examine the ring ads: they're all basically the same thing. And if your friends show you their engagement ring, the first thing they'll talk about is the size of the stone. Bigger seems to be seen as better. But I'm not sure it always is. Beyond Cut, Colour, and Clarity, is something infitely less easy to calculate... character. I like a stone with history, I like a stone with a story.

When I don my late Mamau's engagement ring, it never fails to draw attention. The filigree setting, the soft white glow in burnished gold; it is unique. In all my life, I've yet to find another one like it. And whenever I look at it, I think of my mamau. I picture her gnarled little hands, washing dishes, peeling potatoes, sewing my dresses, bandaging my wounds. I see the glint and sparkle and it connects me at once to something so much more precious than any monetary quantity.

So yeah- diamonds ARE forever. But only if you're making memories with them. If you're not, they're just another rock.

And on the subject of memorial diamonds? How cool is this? I can think of a few people who'd make lovely tributes to wear on my hand. In particular? I think my ex-husband would make a fabulous fashion accessory. He'd be so much more useful in death than he has ever been in life!

Free Piglet!

2005-10-05T15:42:00.000-04:00

Okay. I understand tolerance. I do. I'm a tolerant person. When some dumb wench gets in front of me with twenty cans of peas in the 12 items or less aisle? I smile graciously and say nothing. When people won't let me into traffic, I wait patiently for an opening and pray for the little buggers, who are obviously going somewhere very important in an awful hurry. When persons possessed of obvious incompetence, ignorance, or bad breeding cross my path, I reward their embarassing behaviours with patience and old-fashioned condescension. (Not the modern, "Looking down my nose at you" version of the word, but the classic, graciousness-and-compassion-dispensing version thereof.) Embracing the spirit of "judge not, lest ye be judged" and "Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you," I always try to give folks the benefit of the doubt. It's the manner in which I was brought up to behave.

But C'mon.... Piglet is somehow religiously offensive? Piglet??

http://relapsedcatholic.blogspot.com/2005/10/our-bulging-go-back-where-you-came.html

I love the Relapsed Catholic's suggestion to go boldly forth and post our pigs. In the spirit of solidarity, allow me to spam this space.

Our Hero:

Another Great Pig of Literature:

Modern Pop Culture Pig:

And the most important pig of all...

And in case you need help cooking your pig, you can't go wrong with one of these:

Although my Mamau would surely recommend you buy one of these instead:

Keeping the little people in their places

2005-09-08T15:10:00.000-04:00

I shall begin this rant of mine with a caveat: I love New Orleans. Of all the cities I've visited in the US, New Orleans is the one place I've ever felt more at home in than my hometown. I love the place. If I could afford to, I'd brave the mosquitos and the humidity and relocate to the Garden District. The damage done to this city strikes at my heart like a bladed weapon. In the hours immediately before and after the storm, I was literally unable to turn away from the television. Unlike so many natural disasters I've witnessed (And I covered a fair few of them in my time working for a media monitoring agency) this one felt personal. This one felt much the same as the 97 flood that took my house. I was indignant. How dare God and Mother Nature strike out at my beloved city? Damn the lot of them for not doing something before the storm hit. What would become of the museums? The restaurants? The cemeteries? The rows of stately houses, the clusters of little shops? Would any of it survive intact?

And then it happened. And it was the stuff of nightmares.

In the days following the tragedy I've seen so many people bitching about the lack of preparedness. About the poor performance of the Mayor and the Governor. About how evil President George failed to fly in, with his cape and tights, and rescue everyone. Because George hates brown people, ya know. And babies. Babies don't vote. He only cares about rich white men who vote, after all.

I will say this: Mayor Nagin is in full CYA mode, throwing blame everywhere but where it rightly belongs- on the local government, on its mismanagement of the period immediately before and after Katrina. Governor Blanco shames me as a woman. She makes fodder for every mysogynist pig who ever said women were too wishy washy and indecisive to hold positions of power. This is at least one woman I wish to hell had stayed home and baked some cookies. They fucked up big time. Pardon my language- but it is true. This was a fubar of amazing proportions. When the local emergency management sends Red Cross buses away full of supplies, when the emergency evac plan buses are left sitting in the water while people drown in their houses- This is Fucked. Up.

But I'm through castigating the government. What else did we expect? An elephant is a mouse built to government specifications. (Thank you, Robert Heinlein.) If you want to make something incredibly expensive and extremely inefficient, you put it in the hands of government. There was something more sinister at work here. Racism. And no, not the racism of the republicans, or even the racism of Ole George (who hates teh brown people.)

No. I'm talking about the subtle, insidious racism endemic to the democratic old south: The plantation mentality.

The people who had means to do so, got the hell out of New Orleans ahead of the storm. The ones left behind, by and large, couldn't. They had no cars. They had no funds. They had noplace to go. What they did have? Was faith. Faith that someone would come. Someone would rescue them.

And so these folks, with the blind faith of children, didn't plan ahead. They didn't plan their routes of escape. They didn't lay in a supply of water and foodstuffs and diapers for their babies. And why would they? The government was going to take care of them, just like they are supposed to. In a few hours, they would come, with their rescue choppers and their boats and such, and take everyone away to safety in the shelters. And then money would be made available to fix everyone's homes, and get the world started up again. Because this is how the world works, right?

Wrong. This is only how the world works if you're a child and the government is your Mama. The grownups, we all know that God helps those who help themselves. Because government is comprised of people, and people make mistakes. People get tangled up in red tape and don't always do the sensible thing. When the fit hits the shan, sometimes they fuck up. Sometimes, they do so spectacularly. So if you're going to rely on anybody, it ought to be yourself. Nobody else has as vested an interest in your own well being, as you do.

But we've spent decades telling these folks that they CAN'T do for themselves. That they're oppressed, that they're disenfranchised, that they start life out from behind the eight ball. And only the democratic party can save them. Only their congresscritters and senators and judges and social workers can put things right, can give them a leg up. Keeping them dependant has kept the democratic party in power for decades down south.

This is the racism of which I speak. The concerned, condescending racism of compassion. "We know better than you, we'll look after you, we'll take care of you."

Maybe I shouldn't call it racism. Maybe it should instead be called classism. Because it's not really about teh brown people. It's about class. It's not skin colour; it's economic background, it's educational level and, above all else, it's about levels of personal responsibility. You spend decades telling people you'll take responsibility for them; you shouldn't be surprised when they expect you to do so. You keep them in subsidised housing, on subsidised incomes; you give them bread and circuses to distract them from their misery, and you make them DEPENDANT. Like children. You rob them of their god-given incentives to do and be better; you rob them of the ability to think and do for themselves...

You keep them in their place.

And I think an awful lot of rich, upper class people (Largely white people, but not solely) like this. They like that the little people are in their thrall. It makes them feel powerful. It makes them feel safer. It keeps the crime confined to certain "bad" neighborhoods and keeps the class strata defined. How many congresscritters' kids play with the children of their constituents, anyway? How many of them even go to the same schools? Of course, they can't. Because the rich send their kids to private schools, and the poor send their kids to the schools mandated by the rich. To learn what the rich want them to. So they can reach a limited economic potential. So they can think what their masters want them to, and do what their masters tell them to...

And thus repeat the cycle. Keeping the top dogs on top, and the little people on the bottom. Where they belong. So they can keep propping up the layers of corruption that feed upon them for their power base.

I'm wandering far afield, here. But my point is this. If every single person who'd stayed behind in New Orleans thought it was THEIR OWN job to look after themselves, and not the job of their government- we might have fewer dead people in the water right now. The dead in New Orleans, they died of inept compassion, they died of politics. And not the politics of the republican party- but the politics of liberalism, the politics of welfare and subsidy, the politics of the plantation state.

Master will take care of you. Big Brother is watching. You don't need to think for yourselves, or look after your own. That's what your government is here for.

When I think about how these people died, waiting for help, hoping for rescue, it makes my blood boil. There were 2 days before the storm hit. There was time enough to get everyone out. It was doable. And no effort was put forth to motivate them. In fact, every possible effort was put forth in NOT motivating the poorest and most desperate of the citizenry. They were trained to wait, trained to rely on big government, and not upon their own resourcefulness.

"What you do to the least of these, you do to me."

I'm thinking about a bumpersticker I saw recently. "Jesus is coming, and he is pissed." I thought it was funny at the time.

Right now? I think it's probably pretty true.

Usually, I just stick this stuff on Livejournal. But this is sort of sweet.

2005-09-07T19:03:00.000-04:00

Pointless, useless urges

2005-09-06T13:41:00.000-04:00

I went to New Orleans the first time, while I was pregnant with my second child. It was the dead of summer, I was huge and awkward, it was hot, humid, and miserable outside. The Ex-Husband made me walk for hours and hours at a brisk pace and was too cheap to buy water. We'd left our older child with my mother and I missed him terribly. The visit should have been completely unbearable. I should never have wanted to return.

But it wasn't, and I did. Want to return, that is. I can't explain any better than this: New Orleans felt homey. I liked where I was. I liked the people. I liked the surroundings. I liked the PLANTS, for heaven's sake. Everything just looked RIGHT. I felt completely content. I could wander the neighborhoods for hours, wondering about the places and the people. I think it was the history- I love history, and there is a palpable sense of it everywhere you look in New Orleans.

I badgered Joe for months afterward. I wanted to live there. I wanted to buy an old house in an older neighborhood and become a local. I've never felt that way about any other place I've visited. Anywhere.

I've been watching the news since before Hurricane Katrina rolled in. Watching with fear in my heart and a knot in my stomach. Then with Anger in my soul. This is a clusterfuck of impressive proportions. I knew LA govt was corrupt. I just didn't realise they were completely worthless as well. It's so damn useful to stand around pointing fingers at each other while the bodies are still floating in the water. Real practical, fellas.

I wish I had money to contribute. There is 200.00 in my bank account, and most of that is already earmarked for bills. I wish I was close enough by to do something. I'm in Kentucky; I could drive down. But what skills do I have to offer? I could do childcare, I suppose. Food preparation. But most likely I'd be another person in the way of the people who do the real work after something like this. I wish I had a guest room to house people.

I wish someone was taking donations of goods; I have seven boxes of outgrown kids' clothes and several bags of baby toys that I'd gladly offer up. I'd cheerfully pare down the house and share what I have, if I knew where to take things.

All I can offer are my prayers. They don't seem nearly enough.

In which the Ornithophobe manages to piss off well nigh everybody...

2005-08-07T15:12:00.000-04:00

It's good to have a secret space.

Sometimes there are thoughts in my head that I know have no place in polite company; thoughts that would shock and alienate everyone around me. I can only imagine the horror, the derision, should I loudly, proudly declare them to the world. "What kind of woman are you?"

But they reside there nonetheless, turning and fomenting, growing ever more rancid with each passing day. Like good wine turns to vinegar; these private thoughts get ugly and mean when I cannot give them voice.

I hate people. I hate society. And I hate the bizarre sexual inconsistencies and strange melange of new right and wrong that permeate our society today.

I don't belong here. I don't want to be "empowered," or "liberated" or My Own Woman.

I want to be protected. I want to belong to someone, and know that they are worthy and righteous and will take care of me, even as I take care of them right back. I want to know my place, and fill it completely; to have clearly defined responsibilities and even more clearly defined taboos.

The ornithophobe- 32, divorced, mother of two, full time employee on the career track- wants a husband, damnit. The old-fashioned variety thereof. I want someone who'll be the head of my household. Someone to tell me "No" occasionally. Or hold me when I feel small. Someone to help manage the decisions, plan the dreams, mow the lawn.

Nobody ever talks about this. My mother, God bless her, never needed a man. She did it all by herself- supported me. Fixed the roof, worked on the car, moved the furniture. Bought a house. Paid the bills. Put away a nest egg. Cared for her dying parents. Through it all, she said many, many times, "I'm more of a man than any man I know." The tone of derision in her voice as she said it was cutting. It told me plainly that she'd have welcomed a man- if she could have found one. A real one. But my father wouldn't keep a job, or buy a home. My stepfather wouldn't support a family, preferring to collect expensive sportscars. Neither marriage lasted a year.

Real men are in short supply these days. For thirty years or more, we've told men they're dispensable, disposable. We can "have it all", we can do it ourselves. Grrlpower, Wymyn's lib, etc, ad nauseum. It's our body, our choice. We're not subject to biological destiny, we have the pill. Every child a wanted child, so abortion is a basic civil right. Marriage is about being "in love", so when you're not in love anymore we have no fault divorce. Don't we want to have more, be more, than some housewife baking cookies and breeding baby after baby like a mindless animal?

I am a failure as a modern woman. Because I do need a man. I always have. I'm thirty two years old and I still want my father. I want a safe place to hide, someone to make me feel cherished and protected. The ex-husband couldn't do this for me. He wouldn't take care of me; instead, he needed me to take care of him. To mother him as his own never did. And I did so happily, but maybe I did not do it well enough. In the end, I just could not win his respect, and without respect there can be no love. He is a boy again now; a thirty five year old boy who enjoys his videogames and his freedom. All that nasty ugly responsibility that he could not adjust to is gone. Some day he will find a girl just like his Mama; she will be a career driven, upwardly mobile feminist who will make HIM feel safe and protected. She'll tell him what to do and when to do it.

I wish him well.

I don't want to make my own future. I want to embrace a joint destiny with someone else. To strengthen their ambitions, to promote their dreams. Mine are so small, so petty. To have a dining room, with kids and grandkids gathered round the table on holidays, warm and happy and FAMILIAL. To have someone beside me as I age, as the face and figure in my mirror comes to resemble that of my grandmother. To lie in eternity alongside a mate as our mortal remains return to dust.

These are my dreams. They are as empty and unattainable as any wish.

I am not designed for being alone. Everything about me is designed for the care and comfort of someone else. God, in his infinite wisdom, gave me warmth, wit, and a generous set of breasts to nurse babies with; he gave me a deep seated need to breed and care for a growing family. I grow good babies, you know. Smart, healthy, happy children, delivered with the ease bestowed on me by generations of peasant ancestors. I'm a decent cook and I'm not a bad housekeeper, when I have enough time to devote to my home. The boyfriend assures me my carnal abilities are not lacking.

I even own my own house, outright. It's paid for.

In short, I should have enough to offer in trade, to net myself the sort of husband I want. Yet the supply of old fashioned, marriagable, family-oriented men is nearly nonexistant. Nobody wants a wife, in the traditional sense of the word. They want someone to bring in an income and change her own oil, who will stay on the pill and not bring them any little unfortunates who eat up portions of their paycheck. Someone who will let them sleep in on Sunday morning and not interrupt them while they're involved in a twelve hour online gaming marathon. They want bedroom playmates and fiscal wizards with fast track careers and a stock portfolio.

They certainly don't want damaged 32 year old women with fatherless sons and daddy issues of their own. They don't want someone who will go, "Hey, you take care of this, and I'll take care of that. You have the career, and I'll throw dinner parties for your coworkers. You mow the lawn and I'll plant flowers in the rosebed. You move the furniture and I'll rub your back afterwards."

My future is assured. I will live alone, in my little three bedroom house. I will wear curlers and a bathrobe, and feed hundreds of cats.

On calling things by their right names

2005-07-03T14:44:00.001-04:00

My belief that life begins at conception isn't religious, it's scientific. If you try to tell me that an embryo isn't "alive" or that one possessing the requisite dna, growing inside its human mother, is not "Human", then I lose all respect for your argument. It's basic sixth grade biology.

As for whether abortion is right or wrong? It's not a religious issue for me, either. God is concerned with our immortal souls, not so much with our mortal bodies. And I'm a reincarnationist; I think those unborn souls go right on into their next incarnation.

So why am I virulently anti-abortion?

My problem is that I think we cheapen all human life by allowing the destruction of people based solely on their location, age, and convenience. I think the "slippery slope" is valid, and that Roe V. Wade is directly responsible for the number of infanticides and dumpster babies occuring in the modern age. I think legalised abortion is bad for our society, plain and simple.

If someone wants to debate me on the morality of it, argue that it's justifiable homicide in some cases- but don't tell me its a surgical procedure, a women's health issue, or some other bit of euphemism. Call things by their right names; know what you're speaking of. Dilation and curetage is forcible opening of a cervix to cut the baby to bits and scrape it out. Suction aspiration tears the baby to bits and sucks it out of the uterus with a vacuum hose. Dilation and evacuation rips a baby to pieces to pick it out with forceps. Saline injection bathes the baby in an acid bath, killing it slowly over an hour, so the mother may vaginally deliver a dead infant. (Or sometimes, a dying one.) The mass of tissue, products of conception... is a person. Just the same as you or me. A living being, snuffed out in the name of "choice."

If I could get past all this, maybe I too could be pro-choice. But I suck at lying to myself. And euphemism doesn't work for me. Some people hear "reproductive health" and think positive things like mammograms and pap smears. The Ornithophobe hears those tell tale words and sees baby bits on a metal tray. And no matter how much I want people to like me, I can't pretend like I don't.

In some ways? I think I AM liberal. Because the way the lefties get over microwaved mice in sunscreen, or bloody baby seals clubbed to death? That's how I get over dead babies. I get sick to my stomach, I get righteously angry. If you think I get uptight about dead baby seals, you should see me about dead baby humans.

What I want to know is, why would anyone NOT feel this way? What sort of mental and emotional gymnastics are necessary to be OKAY WITH THAT? How does one do it? How do you get there? Can you draw me a map? Because I just don't understand.

Amerika

2005-06-23T19:00:00.000-04:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/23/AR2005062301067_pf.html

Lets all take a moment to mourn for our country. Private property rights died today at the hands of supreme court justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, and Anthony Kennedy. Remember these names. It's entirely possible they'll be as infamous as King George the Third one day.

Speaking of King George, at least he was insane. What are the justices' excuses?

One of the saddest experiences of my life was watching the Louisville Airport Authority seize Highland park and its surrounding neighborhoods over a decade ago. It still smarts. Smaller middle and lower class homes were forcibly taken to "expand" Standiford Field, creating the "Louisville International Airport." (It's a fine example of creative advertising, as the only way you're leaving Standiford Field/LIA on an international flight is in a UPS box.) Except that the expansion never happened. Instead, a few tacky motels went up. The remainder of the area is derelict; the houses gone, the yards overgrown with weeds and the streets filled with dumpings of debris. (I saw a couple of couches there recently, if anyone needs a mid-seventies foldout in need of a little reupholstering.) Yet once this was an historic area of Louisville. Nearly every family has come through Highland Park at one time, or another. It was cheap real estate, and truly "ethnically diverse." In the early part of the century it housed the railroad workers, the immigrants; in the thirties it was home to families moving from farm life to factory work; in the forties it was full of young families saving for their first home. (My mamau grew up there, and went back with her young husband and a couple of babies while waiting for this very house to be built.) In the sixties and seventies it was one of the few places a single mother or a retiree on a fixed income could afford to buy a decent house. The eighties saw the influx of a new wave of immigrants; Korean, Laotian, Vietnamese; as well as refugees from the Soviet Union. Catholic Charities helped place these families in low income housing, and very often, that housing was in the heart of Highland Park.

It wasn't much to look at. Mostly shotgun houses; narrow streets and alleyways. But there was James Russell Lowell school, where both my grandparents had been students. There was the house where my Uncle was born. There was the house my great grandparents lived in. Most disturbing of all, there was the house inhabited by one of my Mamau's relatives. Losing her lifelong home in her final years almost certainly shortened her life.

It was bad enough when the government could take your home for a public work. (I'd suggest further reading on the "Land between the Lakes" and the "Land between the Rivers" for your edification. I get too angry when I talk about it, I tend to use bad language and villify John F. Kennedy. People get nasty when you speak ill of the dead. Suffice it to say, families who had owned their land since before the American Revolution, were tossed out. Their homes burned, their belongings stolen, sold to tourists, or destroyed. People died. And this happened in our lifetime, under the guise of creating 'public space' for hunting and fishing, as well as more tax revenue. Except the tax revenue never materialised, and the area still doesn't financially support itself. I guess people have better places to go fishing. )

But as horrible as the above examples are, things got worse today. Infinitely worse.

Imagine it. Your home brings in say, 800.00 a year in taxes. That same property, commercially zoned, could be worth three times that in tax revenue, to say nothing of the economic impact of additional job revenue. THERE IS NOW NOTHING TO PREVENT THEM FROM SEIZING YOUR HOME, AND GIVING IT TO A BUSINESS/DEVELOPER/CORPORATION. That's what this decision means. You no longer own your own home. You have it conditionally on the sufferance of your local government, and if they so choose, they can take it. For any reason, or no reason at all.

You know, even Mad King George limited his tax-seeking to import tariffs. He didn't come after the privately held houses, farms, and businesses of the American colonists. And the last time somebody got tax-happy and infringed upon our liberty, we had a little revolution. Maybe we need another one.

Some links for the curious:

http://www.courier-journal.com/reweb/community/placetime/southend-highlandpark.html

http://newmedia.colorado.edu/~socwomen/newsletter/myturn7.html