“…And Hold Their Manhood Cheap…”

Possibly the most heroic speech…

Ever.

Funny Bits From The Blogosphere

Here’s a few funny bits that have got me thinking and kept me laughing in the last few days:

• Top 16
  Wes, Animate Matters

  I was reading a list of Amazon’s top-ten best-selling books mentioned at Vox’s, and it gave me an idea for some fictional titles which would amuse me. And yes, I have too way much time on my hands.

• How To Make A Woman Happy
  MomLovesBeingAtHome

  It’s not difficult to make a woman happy.
  A man only needs to be:
  1. a friend
  2. a companion
  3. a lover
  4. a brother
  5. a father
  6. a master
  7. a chef
  [...and the list goes on, and on, and on...]

Republican Politics

In the race for the Republican nomination, there’s something for everyone.

There’s a liberal who’s principled and experienced but still liberal.

There’s a populist who tickles ears and yet is Christian, courageous, and popular.

There’s a fiscal conservative with serious experience and a very public track-record who wore a dress (once, on camera), supports homosexual marriage, and is not in favor of criminalizing mothers who have abortions (a slight but significant difference from actually being pro-choice).

There’s some dude with two first names and some good ideas, but with serious inconsistency, and serious stupidity concerning international affairs and national security harking back to pre-WWII Republican isolationism.

There’s a conservative business leader and governor with a funny first name and movie-star looks who’s been consistent, if not amazing.

And there’s a movie star without the looks who’s been amazing, if not consistent. If only he acted like he wanted to win.

There are others, but they are also-ran’s or sometimer’s and not worth consideration at this stage in the game.

I don’t much care for the liberal, the populist, the fiscal, or Mr. Two Names. Though I could stomach the fiscal, were he to, by some stretch of imagination, win the nomination. The others I abhor for various reasons.

The liberal is neither a man of honor nor a man of principle. He has convenient and far-sighted-sounding reasons for his liberal attachments and accomplishments, but his willingness to sell the farm, ideologically speaking, is not the measure of a man. Personally, I admire and honor his courage in his past. But I fear to many years within the beltway, and those who have spent those years with him not recommending him in the droves we’d expect, are very indicative of a lack of character and ability.

The populist is just that. He uses his sincere (and I do not doubt, genuine) Christianity to excuse and/or support and champion decidedly non-Christian policies. God did not institute a welfare state (for individuals or corporations) in Theocratic Israel. Instead He instituted laws and policies which protected individuals from each other’s harm and sin. Claiming that “green” science is correct in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary does not lead me to believe he is either “wise as a serpent” or “harmless as a dove”. In fact, I would submit the populist is the inverse: He is wise as a dove and harmless as a serpent (taken ironically, of course).

Mr. Two Name needs no rebuttal as he is his own best revealing mirror. Dismissed out of hand is the best response to the majority of his supporters.

I’d like the movie star to catch a fire, but his lack of consistency heretofore is troubling, and I believe, more accurately indicative of who he’d be in office that what he’d be if he did catch a fire.

The man I voted for in my last election (for some time at least) in California is the leader. A realization I came to after considering what he does when there’s not supposed to be a camera around.

Here are a few articles from across the web which seem to me to be particularly salient and and appropriate to the candidates in this race.

•  The Trouble With McCain
  Jay Cost, Wall Street Journal

  Thirty-four Republicans have endorsed Mr. Romney, while just 24 have endorsed Mr. McCain. Furthermore, Mr. Romney’s supporters are more in line with conservative opinion. Their average 2006 ACU rating was 84.1, and 26 of them come from states Bush won in 2004. Meanwhile, the average 2006 ACU rating for Mr. McCain’s supporters is 70.7, and just 12 of them come from Bush states. In light of Mr. McCain’s résumé, this is consequential. He should have locked up most members of the Republican caucus, but he has not.

• Hillary And MLK
  John McWhorter, Wall Street Journal

  …[T]here she was on “Meet the Press” Sunday, having to defend herself for simply saying that while King laid the groundwork (which she acknowledged), another part of the civil rights revolution was Lyndon B. Johnson’s masterful stewardship of the relevant legislation through Congress. She was arguing that she is more experienced in getting laws passed in Washington than is Barack Obama — which is true.

• Barak Obama And Israel
  Ed Lasky, American Thinker

  One seemingly consistent them running throughout Barack Obama’s career is his comfort with aligning himself with people who are anti-Israel advocates. This ease around Israel animus has taken various forms. As Obama has continued his political ascent, he has moved up the prestige scale in terms of his associates. Early on in his career he chose a church headed by a former Black Muslim who is a harsh anti-Israel advocate and who may be seen as tinged with anti-Semitism.

• Where They Stand
  Pete Du Pont, Wall Street Journal

  …[T]he political ups and downs of the candidates and the electricity of the campaign–”I am promising change!”–matter much less than the substantive policies the next president would implement regarding the five most important challenges facing our country.

A Few Good Men

Kindred on the battlefield of culture. Brothers in the fight of moral excellency. Trained and battle-hardened soldiers on the front lines of American society.

Dinesh D’Souza and David Limbaugh are two men I respect greatly, both for their principles and for their courage.

Of all the substantive columnists I read regularly, these two are those I read the most reliably, popping out of Google Reader to read them on their home sites more consistently than any other writers of the hundreds of articles I peruse each day.

Recent columns from each of these two are noteworthy and well worth reading and I encourage all to add them to their regular reading.

•  Dinesh D’Souza - How Christians Ended Slavery
  

  [W]ho killed slavery? The Christians did, while everyone else generally stood by and watched.

• David Limbaugh - Observations on the Presidential Races
  

  It’s disappointing to watch candidates from both parties accept the premise that criticizing your opponents’ records and pointing out their inconsistencies and lies is engaging in dirty politics. It is not dirty but obligatory to draw distinctions between you and your opponents. Dirty politics is distorting one’s record or spreading lies about a candidate.

• Dinesh D’Souza - Are Atheists Cultural Christians?
  

  In The God Delusion, Dawkins portrayed the Christian God as a wicked, avaricious, capricious, genocidal maniac. Dawkins even blasted Jesus for such offenses as speaking harshly to his mother. Yet if the Jewish and Christian God was such a monster, what sense does it make for Dawkins to embrace the cultural influence of that deity?

• David Limbaugh - Conservatism’s Identity Crisis
  

  [F]or Republicans, there’s a fierce intramural debate not just over how conservative the party should be but also over the very definition of conservatism.

Where Government Has No Business

In the Colorado Springs Gazette, an opinion article points out that, regardless of individual positions on embryonic stem cell research and cloning, we should agree the government should not sponsor ANY scientific research.

The central government of the United States has no business funding radical medical experiments, whether or not the president deems them morally correct. It’s not the government’s duty.

Highly recommend this article. The free, unregulated market provides support to those who deserve, need, or work hard for the support, and denies support to those who do not try or whose ideas have no merit.

Government handouts always create an atmosphere of expectation and dependence. The government is not only poorly equipped for accurate and fair judgment of proposals for grants, it is significantly more prone to scamming and cheating in spreading its copious amounts of money.

Look no further than the times when altruism and human goodness should have most triumphed: natural and national disasters. The cleanup after hurricane Katrina was as much a disaster as the hurricane itself, with longer lasting damage continuing even today.

Take all grants and pork out of the government pot. Deny congress and any government authority the ability to give money to anybody for any reason beyond payment for services rendered. Then take the largess which will be left over from that and return it to the people who’ve paid for the privilege of living in this great nation. With the extra money suddenly available there can be nothing but good as they choose the destination for their additional retained earnings.

Millions of individual moral agents are deciding the destination of their own money is vastly more efficient and entirely superior to one vast immoral one spreading its unearned largess to the noisiest mouths.

Beyond the fiscal and governmental arguments, there are inescapable moral arguments in this issue:

While the attempt to obtain embryonic-like stem cells for the purpose of establishing cell lines without destroying embryos is, in principle, morally laudable, any procedure that places at risk the health and life of a human embryo for purposes that do not directly benefit the embryo is morally unacceptable.
~Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, Ph.D.

“We Are Human Beings”

From Stand To Reason:

“[A]t all stages of our lives — from the embryonic through the fetal, infant, child, and adolescent stages and into adulthood — we are human beings with dignity and the right to life. Our dignity does not come from having achieved a certain level of intellectual proficiency or even conscious awareness. … We have our dignity in virtue of the kind of entity we are: that is human being, a creature with a rational nature. And we became that when we came to be.”
~Dr. Robert George

Added by American Texan:

At no time is the human being a blob of protoplasm. As far as your nature is concerned, I see no difference between the early person that you were at conception and the late person which you are now. You were, and are, a human being.
~Dr. Jerome Lejeune

Evandelism

Originally posted November 19th, 2006.

Reading the posts scrawled on a rest-stop bathroom wall, this gentleman sees one etched deep into the wood of the wall: “Jesus Saves”. He does not dispute the accuracy nor the necessity of this statement, but he wonders: “Is this evangelism or evandelism?”

How will the world know we are Christians? What will cause them to see they are sick? Only those who know they are sick will see a doctor, and only those who see how that we have what they need will see to find the answer we have found.

It is by sacrificing, giving up something we value to achieve something of greater value. I am reminded of Roger Magnussen’s statement that God hides behind those little compromises waiting for us to make the right decision and then to bless us. A young girl, popular in her school, cheerleader, full of worldly success for someone so young, attends a church youth group and is drawn to the love of Jesus. She is faced with a quandary as the youth meeting is the same night as her cheerleader practice and her coach has told her she cannot miss any more practices and remain on the team. She seeks counsel from her pastor and he tells her that the youth meetings are not required to be a Christian. She agrees but says that to her the youth meetings and her Christian life is more important than cheer leading. The pastor does not see her for several more weeks and assumes that she has decided to continue cheer leading. Then, one at one youth meeting the pastor sees this girl walk in with the most radiant of smiles. She spots the pastor and walks directly over to him and tells him that she told her cheer leading squad and coach that the was not a “cheerleader who happens to be a Christian, but that she is a Christian who happens to be a cheerleader.” The pastor is stunned and then looks behind the girl to see a whole line of girls that have not attended before, and a woman who he has not seen at church before. The girl proceeds to introduce the entire cheer leading squad and the coach who heard this young girls testimony, so simply and directly put and so surely lived that they were drawn as moths to the light and as bees to nectar. Several weeks later the pastor has the joy of baptizing the entire cheer leading squad and then the double joy of seeing one of those freshly baptized girls turn around and baptize her own mother, the coach.

This is not some made up emotional tear jerker to make you want to be a ‘good Christian’, this is a true story and it happened at my church. I am reminded of the Steven Curtis Chapman song that says over and over to “Live Out Loud!” Am I a student/musician/worker/geek/brother/son/nephew/grandson/etc who just happens to be a Christian, or am I a Christian who just happens to be a human living my life out among all these I touch?

Visa, It’s Everywhere You Want To Vote

Originally posted November 11th, one of the first articles written here at I, Pandora.

Internet voting is a hot-button issue today with plethora of heated rhetoric and a paucity of actual fact (it’s interesting to note that nearly all nearly all hypothetical e-voting catastrophes predicted by the dooms-day-ers in the media had ‘big’ and ‘evil’ corporations changing the outcome to favor those ‘dirty republicans’ while those paragons of virtue, the Democrats, where standing by with armies of Lawyer Friar Tuck J.D. ready to swing to the rescue and when the election fell to the Democrats, there were NO allegations of ANY fraud, not that I’m saying anything, but…).

So, rantings and ravings and very long run-on sentences aside (personally I see no point in raves) I ask you this: If Visa and Mastercard and Discover and Amex and even Diners Club can do it, why can’t we? Think this through with me: every day, all over the world, there’s a nearly real-time network that securely and with a minimum of fuss and complete transparency and verifiability transfer large sums of money between owners. Now all we’re asking for is a system that presents options, records choices, tallies outcomes, one or two days a year, in a technologically advanced country.

So lets see what I can dream up for my Credit Card Voting System: Voter Jane comes in to her voting location with her proper ID (yes, it is stupid not to require some (relatively) empirical form of ID to vote, no, no one will be ‘disenfranchised’ (liberals like to use large words to describe supposed social ills so dumb people will repeat them thinking this makes them sound smart). She swipes that drivers license that everybody should darn well have, the system checks that she is eligible, and hasn’t voted yet. Think of the possibilities here though, she could be in Zimbabwe, with her Army Ranger unit (yes, I know we’re not really there, this is hypothetical, and I had to make it at least a little bit of a challenge), and she could be presented with her local ballot issues. Or Chicago, when she’s a resident in Poduncville Wherever, the point is, this is what happens every time you slide that magic card at Walmart or the Ritz-Carlton. If the system finds that she’s already voted, it could present the election staff the location of the previous vote, the choices made and other pertinent data necessary for deciding who is the correct Voter Jane.

Do you see what I’m getting at here? We’re still scared about “paper trails” and security and evil corporations buying our vote from the sleazy hacker next door, when the reality is mundane and bla and the future is oh-so-bright.

I’ve figured out what the Democrats want. They don’t really care about the paper trail, they just want to cut down more trees and be able to blame the Republicans.

Quintessentially American

Originally posted January 24th, 2006. Written while in Italy a few weeks earlier.

I’m writing this on a notepad while on a train speeding across Italy. While passing through the Formia station a few Americans got off the train and stood for some moments on the platform before moving off to their destination. I’d spotted and heard them while on the train and, though I’d not talked with them I just wanted to let them know another American is adventuring in Italy and our paths had crossed (don’t think this makes sense? try living alone in a foreign land and see what odd things come to mind).

So I’m casting about for a sign or signal they’d immediately recognize which would associate the signer (me) as American. Thumbs Up? No, everyone does that, everywhere, and it’s universally recognized. V for Victory? No, I’d just look like a blond-haired, fair-skinned, blue-eyed Asian posing for a photograph trying to look American. Several other signs where thus considered and discarded before I found one that would unmistakeably label me as America.

I did not make this sign as I was too far away while the train was at the platform, and they’d moved off before the train passed by where they’d been, and they’d likely have been very offended.

Yes I have not seen this particular gesture since leaving the good ol’ US of A, and I’ve not really missed it either, until now. The one sign I could show that would definately label me as American was the binary 4, the raised central, the birdie, “the finger”.

Italia: Initial Reactions

Originally posted from Italy on December 29th, 2006.

After only two days in country, my initial reactions to Italy, are that it’s a country living in and devoted to the past. There seems to be little industry besides tourism in many places. Though this is definitely colored by my being a tourist, duh. But consider Venice, where two-thirds of the population consists of seasonal foreigners (regular tourists) during the summer months, and in the winter the population bundles up and hunkers down to last out the cold and slow trickle of tourists.

There is much beauty, truly, and Italy definitely has something to share with the world concerning history, art, etc, and with that there is to be no arguing. But consider also that the birthrate is 1.2 per woman (not per couple, per woman), and that children are staying single and staying home until their very late twenties (24-29 yrs old avg max age of children at home). Also, in watching the TV channels, there are several stations of voice-over movies all made in Hollywood California. And several other stations playing “spaghetti westerns” (and yes, that’s what they call them, and they’re all voice-over in Italian). One station of German language sports news and German (mostly) original movies (though a few voice-overs here as well). Two English stations, BBC World and CNN. There is little original Italian art (movies, music, etc) on the telly, which is sad considering the history of Italy leading the art world.

Instead, Italy seems to be constantly living in it’s past. This is not a totally bad thing. If this history existed in America, with thousands of years of awe-inspiring historical structures, we’d have torn them all down for the hazards they posed to Americans with Disabilities and various dummies and tourists of all IQ levels. We’d have sued them all out of existence. We’d have gates and fences keeping people hundred of feet and more from all structures with any non-standard-meeting designs and architecture. Also, America has little enough respect for it’s own history, choosing instead to chase frenetically after the future. This is America’s strength. And its weakness. Italy’s strength is it’s reverence of its history, and this is its weakness.

Italy has no future, and America has forgot its past.