Pretty normal, for a Master’s degree

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Piss on ‘em!

There’s been a fair bit of outrage from the usual nancy-boys about Marines urinating on Taliban corpses.

Piss on’em, I say… at least the nancy-boys.

Pissing on a corpse is to corpse desecration as waterboarding is to torture: it leaves no physical damage, and it gets the point across. As far as I know, being doused with bodily fluids does not impact a Muslim’s chances of getting to Paradise, as would dumping a Neti pot full of lard into his nostrils. So the corpse wouldn’t care, being dead and all. As for the corpse’s kin, it’s argued that marking the metaphorical yellow streak down the corpse’s back with a literal yellow streak will cause them to hate us. Given their kind and thoughtful gifts of RPGs (not role-playing games) and IEDs, that’s certainly to be avoided at all costs. If it hurts their poor widdle feelings, piss on ‘em.

Vanderbeogh offers some perspective. Radical I-slammers have been known to desecrate American corpses while they were still alive. And there were a number of pictures taken during WW II of creative uses for used heads that Japanese no longer had a use for. And mind you, this was an enemy more worthy of honor, who showed more courage and who didn’t have to be bribed with a post-mortal harem in order to fight. Where was the outrage? Why didn’t we cede Hawaii to the Japanese to expiate our shame at our horrible actions? Might it have been because the Japs were whappin’ heads too? In the present conflicts, we haven’t been leaving heads around, or taking scalps or scrotums. That the lowest we’ve gone is urination shows that we’ve come a long way by historical standards. We even gave their late boss a Muslim burial at sea, instead of turning him into a sideshow exhibit. Consider it a step towards nation-buiding, the Marines symbolically saying “Ur-a-nation”.

My wife points out that just about every pickemup truck has a window decal of a little boy pissing on something or other. Why aren’t the folks who think this is My Lai agitating for a law to ban such an influence on impressionable youth?

OK, I know what the Church teaches about the dignity of all humans, that this may tactically have been a bad move, that allowing the scene to be captured visually is an act of stupidity. Yeah, OK, it shouldn’t have happened. But in a world where folks are more excited about warm urine than hot lead, I’m going to save my outrage for something worthwhile.

Stupid manufactured outrages

We have Obama’s Infamous Halloween Party, which the dextrosphere is so outraged about that they’ve suddenly discovered class warfare. And when called on that, they backtrack and say, “It’s not the party, it’s the cover-up”, even though their previous statements made the cover-up perfectly understandable. Look, the White House throws parties; always has, always will, and they are always lavish by 99%-er standards. We don’t know how much or if Johnny Depp et al charged to be there, but most of the rest is penny-ante stuff. (Punch in blood vials…what a cool idea, and not that spendy.) When they start throwing parties that involve showering in the blood of virgins, I’ll get excited. (Not that that would ever happen; if a Democrat ever actually found a virgin, she’d be deflowered before she got to the White House.) Yes, the cover-up was a bad idea, but this is the President that considers his school records to be a state secret; it’s not exactly new behavior. The only people to really look bad in all this are the White House press corps, who are revealed to be total lapdogs and should resign en masse.

In the sinistrosphere, we have Pat Cunningham of the Rockford Register Star claiming that Kansas House speaker Mike O’Neal “prays for Obama’s death”. Well, not that, exactly. There’s this email that’s been going around for awhile, I received it several months ago. Here’s the text as I received it:

—– Psalm 109:8
My wife and I were in slow-moving traffic the other day and
we were stopped behind a car that had an unusual Obama bumper sticker on it.
It read: “Pray for Obama. Psalm 109:8″.

When we got home my wife got out the Bible and opened it up to the scripture.
She started laughing & laughing. Then she read it to me.
I couldn’t believe what it said. I had a good laugh, too.
Psalm 109:8 ~ “Let his days be few and brief; and let others step forward
to replace him.”
At last — I can honestly voice a Biblical prayer for our president!
Look it up — it is word for word! Let us all bow our heads and pray.
Brothers and Sisters, can I get an AMEN?

Here’s the version which was passed on by Speaker O’Neal, per Cunningham:

In another of O’Neal’s emails, he referenced Psalm 109 from the Old Testament, which reads in part:

May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.
May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their ruined homes.
May a creditor seize all he has; may strangers plunder the fruits of his labor.
May no one extend kindness to him or take pity on his fatherless children.

O’Neal wrote: “At last — I can honestly voice a Biblical prayer for our president! Look it up — it is word for word! Let us all bow our heads and pray. Brothers and Sisters, can I get an AMEN? AMEN!!!!!!”

Now, I suspect “referenced” mean about what my version says. And you’ll notice that “O’Neal wrote”, miraculously, exactly the text which I received…which he probably received too. Now, “O’Neal wrote” this in the sense that he forwarded it to others, which DOES make him responsible for the content. But his crime here is stupidly and thoughtlessly forwarding emails…a crime that I suspect Pat Cunningham is not immune from. And if forwarding an email is “praying” for anything, well, I’m going to start saying the e-rosary: email the Hail Mary to 10 of my friends, the Our Father to another, and the Fatima tag to another. Of course, soon I’ll be blacklisted by all my friends, but that doesn’t matter; I can still “pray” electronically, even if it bounced back.

Now, why are we worried about trivia like parties and an itchy trigger finger on the “send” button when the nation is collapsing?

Second verse, same as the first

In the wake of the revelations about that miserable little twink Jamie Kirchick’s hatchet job against Ron Paul, I found myself reading blog posts from the last Presidential election cycle, in search of links from back then. I remember being pissed at cur-CHICK at the time, but there wasn’t a lot on the blog, unless it was all slightly earlier and on the Case blog. The WordPress search functions are virtually nonexistent. During the worst of it all, I was abandoning the anti-Paul blogs and reading a lot more at lewrockwell.com.  I don’t so much now; Lew’s crew can get into a sort of kneejerk libertarian negativity. But that concentration of Catholic libertarians were certainly instrumental in my own conversion. And in reading back, the current froth-at-the -mouth about Ron Paul seems very old hat. I have to wonder if Ace of Spades might actually be James Kirchick’s beard. All those busty cheerleaders and talk of hobo-hunting…the man doth protest too much, methinks.

Sheeps is skeered of wookies

“I don’t agree with Pauls extreme position on libertarianism either.” (comment here)

Effin’ ay, you think that a sitting US representative who earmarks has an ‘extreme position on libertarianism’?? Sir, you don’t know what the term means (as is proven by the rest of your comment.)

Breitbart isn’t taking his trash out

Memo to Republicans: Where’s ObamaCare’s Replacement?
by Dr. Susan Berry

Dr. Susan Berry is a practicing clinical psychologist. Susan uses her skills to help people learn how to empower themselves.

Listen, shrink: if you want us to be empowered, leave us the fuck alone, OK?  We need to replace Obamacare like we need to replace cancer with heart disease.

The obligations of business

I got into way too much trouble on Facebook just before Christmas. But the one bit I’m going to discuss here concerns a friend who was highly offended at Hallmark because she was looking for a Christmas card for her son and his partner, and the only gay Christmas card they had was lame. I expressed the opinion that “[identity group] Christmas cards” were a silly idea, and she got offended, and all of her girlfriends with her, and I decided it was best to bow out. But I really need to finish the issue somewhere where I don’t feel I’m trampling somebody’s feelings.

First: she found one gay Christmas card. Would we have seen such a thing in the small town we grew up in, in the ’70s? You’ve come a long way, baby.

Second: what constitutes a gay Christmas card?  A card with a picture of two guys on it, or two women? Do the cards that say “To the both of you” have specifically heterosexual imagery? Most of the ones I’ve seen are pretty lame. Do they say “Horny holidays to you and your partner?” For that matter, where are the heterosexual Christmas cards, and what do they say? Yeah, they’re out there, where they keep all the edgy cards. And they’re generally borderline offensive. And I suspect I’ve seen gay cards with them…but not by Hallmark. Indeed, a Web search confirms that there are a bunch of people doing gay cards.

She was looking for something special, and they had cards for all these other relationships, so why not this one? Well, everyone has parents, and more often than not alive. Most people have children, grandchildren, inlaws and bosses (though fewer of all of them, these days). Indeed, this was for an adult child and his mate. But only about 3% of the population is gay. And how many people would get a member of that 3% a card that celebrates or even acknowledges their gayness?  While yes, families are important at Christmas, what we’re celebrating is the birth of Jesus, not somebody’s sexual orientation.

Let’s look at this from the point of view of Hallmark. The gay market is a niche market. Now, yes, there’s money there. But the bigger the company, the more conservatively they’d have to play. What they could make from the gay market could be dwarfed by a concerted protest against gay cards. And a lot of stores wouldn’t stock them. I’m cool with the idea of buyers having cards that look like them, or the people they’re sending to. Hallmark has the Mahogany collection, but that’s a much bigger market. A search at the Hallmark site under “homosexual, Christmas” got 859 hits, but I wouldn’t call any of them “a gay Christmas card”. (I did several similar searches, with “gay” and “holiday”, with similar results).

What bothers me about this discussion was the implication that a company was somehow obligated to serve a particular market, because members of that market thought it was the right thing to do.  Hallmark is obligated to do nothing except make its stockholders happy, no more than I am obligated to send my gay friends gay Christmas cards…because, you know, they are so much more to me than a positive-ground DNA interface.

Why am I here?

WordPress shuts down controversial anti-Islamic site.

Copland and Perry

The day began with one of my lefty Facebook friends raving about Rick Perry’s TV ad using Aaron Copland’s music. I hadn’t heard the ad, so I played it there as it was set out. Now I read Tom Jackson, linking the ad and noting that the music is NOT Copland. And indeed, it isn’t. Not only is it not any Copland piece that I know, but the woodwind writing doesn’t ring true; it’s too dense and solid. It’s certainly Copland-LIKE. But so is most of John Williams, just to mention the most famous miner of that lode. When you’re the Iconic American Composer, you set the style for icons. And that style has become the musical shorthand for “wide open spaces good old-time America”.

It was apparently an Alex Ross tweet that got the whole Perry/Copland meme going. Now, there’s less than no love lost between Ross and Perry; I’m a Ron Paul guy myself so I really don’t give a shit one way or another (especially as I’m not much motivated by gay issues). So yea, it was a deliberate attempt to make Perry look bad (as opposed to a passing cultural observation.) But then, the standard musical formula for love scenes in an earlier movie era was to use fake Tchaikovsky…who was of course queerer than a $3 bill. Yes, passion is passion (like “a mouth is a mouth”), but if we’re going to read things into films, based on the back story of composers who inspired film music composers, just what does that signify? If one is responsible for taking into account the sexual preferences of the inspirations on one’s media employees, then what was Perry’s team to do? I suppose that they could use fake Charles Ives, who had pretty impeccable gay-averse credentials (I don’t use the term “homophobic” because such people generally do not fear gays…though considering how many gays are  into physical culture, perhaps they should .),  but polytonality doesn’t suggest “E pluribus unum” and conservative politics to the average listener…. not to mention that Ives’ source material was diversity-deprived, being very Christian, and very WASP, and hasn’t been on the hit charts since 1898 at the latest. Which may, now that I think of it, might be an advantage to Perry.

The irony is probably lost on Perry’s target audience, who, if they noticed the music at all, probably thought it sounded like “movie music…John Williams… the score from The Patriot“, in order of specificity. I’ve never seen Brokeback Mountain, but I have to wonder now if there are Coplandisms there, and what they mean.  This friend-on-a-friend stuff is weak tea… which may be why the Internet insisted on amping it up to real Copland.

Churches: more than fried chicken.

Increasingly, I observe that there is a religion called “Catholicism”, which is based on the writings and traditions of the Apostles and has a consistent two-millennium tradition and track record, and another religion called “Catholicism” which is practiced by those born into it, which has different premises about the nature of man, of good and evil, and our responsibilities to God. I’ve had people tell me I’m getting it very wrong, but I don’t think that’s true. And I’ve had other people think I’m a saint, and I KNOW that isn’t true. All I know is that there’s a disjunct.

I recently had a pair of observant Catholics tell me almost braggingly about their year of premarital boinkery…they aren’t the first or only young people to jump the gun, and I of all people have BTDT, but…why are you telling me this? I may be wearing black because I just came from a concert, but I’m not a priest and this is not a confessional.  Likewise, I’ve been told that a priest should ignore older people living together without benefit of clergy and invite them to the Eucharist, and that to expect them to point out that sin is sin is a violation of “grace”.  Hey, forgiveness is a great thing, and I’m willing to forgive you beating me, but you have to put the baseball bat down first, because I want some evidence that you’re sorry.. Jesus is on the Cross for you, right now, so put the hammer and nails down already.

Much the same make-your-own-rules mentality surfaces in the Evangelical churches as well. “Mere Christianity” is rapidly becoming “merely a label”, or this notion that Christianity is doing what Jesus did.  Well, hey, that’s part of it, and I’d be more open to that if you weren’t so convinced that Jesus was a Palestinian Communist agitator, or if you were more open to doing what Jesus did after Palm Sunday.

The folks who want the Church to be a democracy, who think they can make their own rules, are the same people who think that their own whims are the criteria for democratic governance, and that fundamental rules can be changed by majority vote. It’s a cancer that began in the world and is now beseiging the church….which will ultimately make the church useless for fixing it in the world…absent intervention by God.

Apropos of all of this. Fr. Zuhlsdorf’s comments on the Minnesota marriage battle led me to this piece on the decay of Lutheranism, and this description of the ELCA convention of 2009, which I’d totally missed at the time, even though I’d been born Lutheran:

When debate began on the proposed sex statement affirming homosexual relationships, a rare and completely unpredicted tornado struck downtown Minneapolis where the convention was held. It ripped off part of the convention center roof, but even more amazing is what happened to Central Lutheran Church directly across the street. That church had earlier hosted the homosexual lobby’s worship services. The tornado actually knocked the cross over on their steeple. This did not deter the vote which passed the proposal reportedly by 66.6%. Many observers did not dismiss these signs as coincidences.