Be Yourself!

A funny Jackie Mason video with a great message.  Be yourself!

Your Food should be genuine as well

Many believe your food should be real too, and I generally agree.  Clean Eating Magazine is full of great ideas on how to eat better.  The website has some good info, but to get the whole deal you need to buy the magazine.  You can pick it up at Whole Foods or Sunflower Market (a cheaper version of Whole Foods where we shop).  The general idea is to stay away from processed foods and to cook using fresh ingredients.

It's difficult to do 100%.  For example, how do you make your own corn chips to go along with your freshly-made pico de gallo?  For those food items you must purchase, they give you tips on the healthiest choices.  For pasta dishes, they recommend the whole wheat variety.

Chiles are a great healthy addition to any meal, and the New Mexico, or Anaheim, variety are a great choice for grilling.  They are meaty and not hot.  I enjoy grilling them and them stuffing them with good food.

Canoas Verdes Recipe

* 1 pot of borracho beans:  Canned beans drained of that syrupy stuff and rinsed.  Cooked in a pot over a fire with a can of beer and your favorite southwest spice mixture

* Chiles:  Cut a slot out of them and take out the seeds and veins if you want them to be less hot.  Chop up the pieces you cut out of the chiles and add them to the beans, along with some onions

* If you want to add meat to the recipe, fix it up and grill it!

* Roast the chiles on the grill.  A second rack up off of the main grilling surface works best.

When the chiles are roasted to your taste, fill them with the beans and the chopped up meat and enjoy!

Have a happy Sunday!

USA: A Subsidiary of Communist China

Can anyone doubt that the blind lawyer and dissident Chen Guangcheng, who apparently says that he feels a "little" lied to by American embassy officials in Beijing, was, more or less, hustled out and dumped into a hospital before he could further disrupt Chinese-American relations, especially with high-level meetings coming up between Hillary Clinton, Timothy Geithner and their Chinese counterparts? (National Interest)

It makes me sick, not figuratively but literally, giving me a disgusting, nauseous knot in my stomach to see how our liberty-hating president and secretary of state have handled the Chen Guangcheng affair. The blind dissident heroically makes his way to the US Embassy, a place he mistakenly thought represented freedom, and our embassy gave him the bum’s rush, turning him over to his totalitarian jailers. If you’re not disgusted, you’re not paying attention.

"I would like to say to President Obama: please do everything you can to get our family out," Chen told CNN, according to a translation of his quote.

Chen's comments came hours after US-based rights group China Aid said the dissident had "reluctantly" left the embassy and that it had been told by "reliable sources" that Beijing had made threats against his relatives. (Yahoo)

We are all Neo-Kissengerians Now

China demanded an apology, and instead of standing up as proud Americans and shining our beacon of freedom on the plight of its dissidents, we cowered and pissed down our leg…

Despite Wednesday's agreement, Beijing demanded that the United States apologise for what it called "interference" in its affairs. 

"China is very unhappy over this. The US action is an interference in China's internal affairs and China cannot accept it," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Liu said. (Yahoo)

A servile US official obsequiously assured our red overlords that “there would be no repeat of the incident.”

We no longer stand for freedom in the world

At the embassy, Chen said he came under tremendous pressure from American officials—“not those from the embassy but others “—to leave the diplomatic facility as quickly as possible. (Melinda Liu) 

This calls to mind Bill Clinton returning young Elian Gonzalez to Castro’s prison island after his mother gave her life bringing him to the safety and freedom of the United States. 

 Janet Reno, fresh from burning up all those religious nuts in Waco, had her stormtroopers raid his relatives’ house in Florida at Castro’s behest.

Chen’s pleas fall on deaf ears…

“Please try to contact the embassy to send someone over here. I need your help, I’m absolutely, absolutely ready to fly out on Hillary Clinton’s plane. Please tell the embassy what I’m saying, Meiyuan,” he pleaded from his hospital room, using my Chinese name. “I don’t know why the Americans didn’t answer my phone calls.” (Melinda Liu)

Sorry Chen! The Land of the Free and Home of the Brave is now the Land of the sheep and home of the bankrupt cowards.

Economist - Chen, China and America
CBS News – US Weighs Options

* - Update:  A Breakthrough?

Elizabeth Warren, Oppressed Minority

Wags are having fun at the expense of Scott Brown challenger Elizabeth Warren, the undocumented Indian. Seems this patrician whitebread Ivy Leaguer listed herself as a minority faculty member based upon a Cherokee great-great-great grandparent. So although technically correct, it is unseemly…

You’ve played the Indian card. You’ve grabbed for minority cred without enduring the minority grief. It’s poached diversity. It’s glommed onto, what, five generations removed... (Margery Eagen)

My great-great grandma was full-blooded Choctaw, complete with her own medicine bag, poultices, homemade clothes and mysterious folkways learned from her elders.  That makes me more of an Indian than professor Pocahontas Warren, but you don't see me billing myself as an Indian blogger.

"7.62 in the corner pocket!"

This is also why I don’t tout myself as an Iraq or Afghanistan veteran. Yeah, I’ve been there, so calling myself such would technically be true, but it plants a certain idea in people’s minds that is just not accurate, and it takes away from not just the true heroes, but also the prosaic grunts who spent ten times as much time there as me and who did much harder and much more dangerous duty than I. As Margery Eagen would say, it would be poached glory.

Divide and Conquer

This is the sliminess that comes from sorting people into special groups and categories and assigning special status based upon tribal affiliations, real or invented.

And it’s not just corrupt and slimy, it is damned maddening. I have Indian friends, and none of them are Boston law professors. They’ve faced discrimination, and I’ve been to the reservations they grew up on. If any of you have seen some reservations in New Mexico, you’d be sickened at this shameless woman’s brazen abuse of “minority cred.”

And the condescending way the PC crowd constantly uses the term Native American is laughable.

Go ask an Indian what he calls himself, he’ll usually say American, and if pressed, he’ll label himself an Indian or the tribe he came from. Drive through reservations in the southwest and look at their school mascots. While indignant agitation groups of white enforcers attack politically incorrect sports team mascots, reservations school sports teams are overwhelmingly Redskins, Tomahawks, Indians, Warriors, Chiefs, Apaches, etc..

Here are some past blog post of mine that are unrelated to Warren but slightly relevant:
Arizona, Take off Your Indian Braids
There’s a Little Eichmann in all of Us

Yes Virginia, Social Security Really is Going Broke

Andrew Napolitano states it flat out:  Rick Perry was right about Social Security.  It has become a Ponzi scheme:

In the first of several challenges to the constitutionality of Social Security, the Supreme Court found that the Social Security fund did not consist of your money. It was merely tax revenue.

It also held that [...] Congress could collect funds, claim it was holding the funds in a savings account and then spend those funds as it saw fit -- for those in need after age 65 or for any other purpose.

... even the court recognized that there would be no trust fund in the traditional sense when it found that the tax dollars collected and supposedly designated for Social Security were "not earmarked in any way."

Thus, the feds have conceded and the courts have agreed that the money you have involuntarily contributed to the so-called trust fund is not yours and can be spent by the government as it pleases, just like any other revenue that the feds collect. (Andrew Napolitano)

I say this with no glee in my heart, and my purpose is not to anger my progressive friends, but to establish some inconvenient and uncomfortable facts.  We all know it by now—Al Gore’s lockbox is full of IOU’s written by the pirates in both parties, but even if it were not, Social Security is still unsustainable in its current state. Payouts have exceeded contributions for decades, making it a de facto pay as you go system, and demographic changes will only exacerbate the problem.

In 1960, there were five workers per recipient; today, there are three, and by 2025 the ratio will approach two. (Origins of Entitlement)

Something’s gotta give. FDR himself wanted to prevent what Social Security has become…

Roosevelt rejected Social Security as a "pay-as-you-go" system that channeled the taxes of today's workers to pay today's retirees. That, he believed, would saddle future generations with huge debts - or higher taxes - as the number of retirees expanded.

Discovering that the original draft wasn't a contributory pension, Roosevelt ordered it rewritten and complained to Frances Perkins, his labor secretary: "This is the same old dole under another name. It is almost dishonest to build up an accumulated deficit for the Congress . . . to meet."

But Roosevelt's vision didn't prevail. In the 1940s and early 1950s, Congress gradually switched Social Security to a pay-as-you-go system.

Millions of Americans believe (falsely) that their payroll taxes have been segregated to pay for their benefits and that, therefore, they "earned" these benefits. […] The trouble is that contributions weren't saved. They went to past beneficiaries. The $2.6 trillion in the Social Security trust fund at year-end 2010 sounds like a lot but equals slightly more than three years of benefits. (Origins of Entitlement)

Recipients get more out than they pay in...

A one-earner couple with average wages retiring at 65 in 1960 received lifetime benefits equal to nearly 14 times their payroll taxes.    (Origins of Entitlement)

Government has made improvements since then (ironically, Reagan is the big hero here) ...

A two-earner couple with average wages retiring in 2010 would receive lifetime Social Security and Medicare benefits worth $906,000 compared with taxes of $704,000, estimate Steuerle and Rennane. (Origins of Entitlement)

Who fills in that $200K per couple shortfall? Should Social Security be converted to an old-age welfare program, with checks sent only to those who are in need and apply for the benefit?

Lest the Left Blotistanis accuse me of defaming FDR, I post this link wherein Conrad Black (one of the many Bete Noires of the left) defends FDR.   I believe Roosevelt was wrong on many things, but sincerely wrong rather than sinisterly so.

We can argue over government crowding out private enterprise, which FDR did do, but I generally agree with Black's assessment.  Roosevelt took action to give men work so they could feed their families, and it got a lot of infrastructure built.  Also, from the previous links I have cited, perhaps FDR could not foresee the great damage future politicians would do to Social Security and other originally-modest social programs.

See also:
Social Security Trustees Report 2012
Social Security Funds to Run Out by 2035

Libertarianism and Labor

Libertarianism places individual liberty first

A frequent visitor here posted a ridiculous anti-libertarian screed he had dragged out of the sewers of Left Blogistan.  It was rife with MSLSD-style soft-headed thinking and false dilemmas.

The hero worshipers on the left can't stand the though of people running their own lives and they are continually pining and sighing for a Strong Man to deliver us from ourselves.

Here are a few snippets from the missive...

"In a perfect libertarian world, it is therefore possible for rich people to buy all the beaches and charge admission fees to whomever they want (or simply ban anyone they choose). In a libertarian world, a self-organized cartel of white people can, under certain conditions, get together and effectively prohibit black people from being able to go out to dinner in their own city

Yes, but they would have to buy the property from somebody first.  And in a perfect libertarian world, black people, muslims, or one-legged German immigrants could do the same thing.  Imagine that.  Free people exercising use of their property free from government interference...

Libertarianism respects the rights of others

The author goes on to completely mischaracterize the libertarian understanding of rights. I won't repeat it, it's too muddled and I don't want to spread the infection. Instead, here's a load of quacking twaddle about a mythical libertarian workplace:

In a libertarian world, a corporate boss can use the threat of unemployment to force you into accepting unsafe working conditions.

A basic libertarian tenet states that you may not harm others or their property. Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of you neighbor's nose. Therefore, a boss may not harm another, and if the dangerous conditions in his factory harm you, you have legal recourse for restitution.

Brilliant libertarian thinker Tibor Machan explains it best, enunciating his first two tenets of libertarianism:

1.  Adult human beings (and children derivatively and with proper adjustments) are sovereign over their lives, actions, and belongings. They have rights, among others, to life, liberty, and property.

2.  Human beings have the responsibility in their communities to respect and act in recognition of this fact when dealing with others.

Unions are compatible with Libertarianism

But let's take is a step further and imagine that to avoid liability, the boss says you must provide your own scaffolding and other expensive safety equipment.  That way, if there's a collapse or mishap due to safety gear, it's not his fault.  It's too expensive to buy on your own, so maybe you could form a union or a coop to collectively buy such expensive equipment.  Further, that union could retain lawyers to press cases of labor law violations.  Yes, under a libertarian system that respects the rule of law, a worker can defend his rights without rent-seeking labor advocates infesting our governments.

Imagine that!  A libertarian world has a place for labor unions and professional guilds.  Not the rent-seeking unions that attach themselves to governments like leeches, but real human collectives that encourage like-minded people to voluntarily band together for the good of all in the group.

The silly little screed also ignores the free market for labor.  A business that treats people like crap will have a harder time attracting workers than one who treats people better.  History and human experience show that monopolies cannot exist indefinitely in a society that respects the rule of law and punishes violators

The writer then whines about the libertarian concept of a limited government...

But they didn't extend the principle to covertly violent, semi-violent, or nonviolent forms of coercion.

Bullying?  Government has unleashed legions of bullies

I guess he doesn't realize that the modern state uses these exact forms of covert coersion, but since its a government strong man doing it, it's OK.  He lists a litany of supposed sins that would happen in his theoretical libertarian world, but ignores the fact that the governments we have now bully us, discriminate, include and exclude based upon officially-sanctioned categories, and picks winners and losers.

So, to sum up the left's position,  it's OK when done to us by a big, giant conglomerate with "Government" stamped on its side, but not when  freely-self-chosen groups of free people do it.  Has he even been in a bowling league or a shooting club? 

The quacking crayon wielder who scrawled this on my wall ended by saying, "Wish I knew the author." Me too, so we could all point and laugh at his colossal ignorance.

Can Mutually Beneficial Exchanges be Exploitative?

Naked Tyranny

Is the 4th Amendment defunct?

The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, ruled that jails may strip search detainees being put into the general prison population.

Progressive screamers, horrified at Obamacare's poor performance before the court a week earlier, seized upon the ruling to impugn the court that they anticipate will knock down Obamacare as well.

It's an interesting tactic, sure to win over those who don't think too hard, but in reality the two cases are unrelated, each decided on its merits.  The one common factor in both cases is government power, but progressives don't want to go there.

Noah Feldman examines the Supreme Court ruling:

As a result, instead of arguing about dignity, the justices disagreed about the practical question of whether invasive strip-searches are reasonably necessary to serve the interests of the jails and prisons. Kennedy’s majority opinion said that they were.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the strip-searches, however well-intentioned when first instituted, now function to humiliate people being put behind bars, sending the message that they are now essentially nonpersons, under the full control of the state.

Yet, it’s worth noting, not even Breyer argued that all strip-searches of people entering jail should be unconstitutional. There is a reason: Privacy, as we know it, is dying. The death is slow and gradual. But it is starting to look inevitable. Supreme Court justices, in general, and Kennedy in particular, rarely fight the trend of history. (Noah Feldman)

The linchpin to the Supreme Court decision was that law enforcement officers have a right to protect themselves and a duty to protect other detainees, and that trumps the rights of people introduced into a detention facility. That makes sense, but it doesn't get to the heart of the issue.

The Real Outrage

People are missing the true outrage here. A non-violent suspect was incarcerated for failure to pay a fine. With all the technology at our fingertips, we suffer under a medieval government. Proliferating policies and ever-expanding laws and police powers are making outlaws of us all, and we are increasingly being treated like hardened criminals by an arrogant, burgeoning police state. We are guilty until proven innocent.

Progressive fans of Big Government take note:

A government that can make you purchase health insurance can also strip you naked and make you squat and cough.

The Sun Also Rises

Reading Hemingway in my youth gave me a lust for adventure and travel. I'm settled with a family now, but I can still dip into Papa's stories on a cool spring night with a thunderstorm building in the background.

Reading The Sun Also Rises for the hundredth time gave me an urge to return to Spain. I noticed for the first time that he mentioned Ronda, a town I had visited . And his Spanish fiesta scenes are so well painted. You fall in with a crowd of happy Spaniards and time and cares fall away. I woke up in a nice couple's house one time, embarrassed and startled on their couch. Perhaps past dirty deeds gave me an attack of conscience, but on this occasion I had done nothing wrong. They and their children laughed at the hung-over American visitor they had sheltered, as if they could see into my soul, and then they served me breakfast.

Good literature can be read and re-read, always providing new insights laid upon your accreted experiences. Hemingway is like that. I read The Sun Also Rises first as a callow teenager, the book pressed into my hands by a wonderful teacher who I hated at the time but have since grown to love. I devoured the book, taking it in superficially as one long party scene from France to Spain. Dining, drinking and carousing on every page. I escaped and did my best to emulate, from Bogota to Sevilla, San Juan to Panama, with some European scenery thrown in as well.

I wonder if Hemingway named the latecomer to the story Edna for Edna St Vincent Millay, a fellow member of the Lost Generation? Even in high school, I enjoyed and appreciated the Lost Generation writers as they transported me back to a strange time long ago. The Sun Also Rises captures the meaninglessness of life many felt in post-war Europe.

Later in life, upon rereadings, I picked up the subtleties, the unstated parallel between Barnes and the steers, etc. It took non-stop carousing of my own to realize just how worn-out, hollow and broke it can make you. Promiscuity and excess always take their toll. I had to live some life first to grasp the deeper meanings. Constant partying and socializing (or shopping, eating, watching TV, whatever) in a vain attempt to make yourself happy can have destructive consequences.

Hemingway, without ever directly commenting on it, captures the moral libertinism that World War I left in its bloody, horrible wake. The old order was gone, with nothing yet taking its place.  Hemingway's novel is about friendships that sting, jealously and selfishness, and loves that cannot be sincerely consummated. It's about people whose souls have been seared by life, finding out too late that seeking the wrong refuge only makes it worse. It's about life.

Fajitas on the Grill

Summer is on the way.  Time to grill!

Actually, I grill all year 'round, but I thought I would share a complete grill meal with you.





Fajitas is a fun backyard meal.  You'll need:

- Package of tortillas
- Fresh onions and bell peppers, sliced in big fajita-sized strips
- 2 cans of beans, drained and rinsed
- Chicken breasts
- Cheap cut of beef
- Spices and or marinades of your choosing

It's really hard to mess this recipe up.  Any kind of tortilla will do, even if you mistakenly get the little corn tortillas that look like drink coasters.  A common thing at parties hosted by Mexicans is to have the fixin's out in bowls and the tortillas warming, and invite guests to help themselves throughout the night.  When you take a tortilla off the warmer to eat, you throw a cold one on.

Anyway, in the upper left, I have a vegetable basket that I put the chopped up peppers and onions in.  Before cooking, I add my own seasoning mix to them and shake them up in a bag.  I also take one of those tenderizer hammers with the spiked head and pound the beef and the chicken breasts.  They take the spices or marinate better that way and they cook quicker.

You can marinate or spice up the meat.  For prepackaged marinates, I like those Weber packets.  One "Mexican" or "southwest" flavored one and one chile lime packet makes a good combo.  You can also look for spice recipes at Spices Inc, or other cooking websites and come up with your own concoction.

For the beans, I rinse them and then do them my way, which usually involves my own spices mix, some roasted chiles, onions, a can of beer and Stubb's bbq sauce (the official favorite of the Silverfiddle household.)  I've never met Mr. Stubbs, but he has my undying admiration.

Put the beans on first, since they take the longest to get the liquid to cook off.  Throw on the basket of onions and peppers next, along with the chicken, and lastly, the beef, since it takes the least amount of time to cook.

When everything is done, chop up the meat and wrap it in tinfoil, and put each of the ingredients in a separate bowl, grab the tortillas and invite everyone to dig in!

Tortilla chips and salsa or guacamole makes a nice accompaniment.

You can wash 'em down with homemade Lynchburg Lemonade (Jack Daniels and lemonade), Margaritas, or your favorite beer (a Ranger IPA from New Belgium Brewery goes nicely).

What do you like cooking on the grill?

How to Win the Student Loan War

The Democrats laid a student loan trap five years ago, and it's set to snap shut on the Republicans.  Speaker Pelosi set it up so the interest rate would double right before the 2012 election (increasing from 3.4% to 6.8%), unless congress stepped in to stop it.  A great pre-planned election year trick.

It's a win-win for Obama:  If the GOP votes to save students from this democrat-manufactured crisis, Obama and the Pelosicrats are victorious heroes, just in time for the 2012 campaign season.  If the GOP prevails in stopping this free money handout to the already morbidly engorged higher education industry, they will be painted as cruel ogres, and the yapping chorus of howling leftwing demagogues will provide background music for the Obama "Are You Insane 2012" campaign.

So what can the GOP do?  If they had any strategery, they would put Big Education on trial for extortion and indict Big Government as a chiseling co-conspirator.

Put Big Ed on Trial

House Republicans can call a hearing on the state of education in this country.  They should subpoena college presidents and put them on trial, demanding to know why Big Ed is gouging the American consumer.

Congressmen could indignantly ask why universities are using taxpayer money to build gold-plated facilities and line their own pockets, even as their prices rise four times faster than the overall rate of inflation?

How is it that we spend more and more on higher education, yet fall further and further behind in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math performance?

They should ask these academics and their big-government enablers what right students and their parents have to dip into the pockets of others to pay their bills.

Government Money is Stupid Money

Government money is stupid money.  And in the case of higher education, it has fueled outrageous price increases.  Here's a thought experiment.  Imagine the federal government ended all college financial aid programs.  Would colleges just dry up and go away?  Or would they adjust their prices to compete for customers?

The federal subsidy of student loans artificially lowers the price presented to the consumer, but picks her pocket all the same because it is funded with everybody's tax money.  It is a peanut butter spread of money to all colleges, allowing them to all race to see who can blow it the fastest offering amenities to attract more students, whose parents complain to congress that the price of college is too high, giving Democrats another chance to blow more money to "fix" a self-created problem.  This is what is known as a self-licking ice cream cone.

As a bonus, Republicans can highlight the phony baloney accounting tricks the Obama administration is employing to fool taxpayers into thinking the Treasury made a profit on the bailouts.  It is an election year ploy based upon creative circular accounting between the Fed and Treasury and pie-in-the-sky projections that have no historical precedent.  It is progressivism in a nutshell.

The Great Divide

Conservative are from Mars, Liberals are from Venus...

Reason magazine has an interesting article on the increasing political divide in this country. It's no surprise to anyone that moderation is decreasing and battle lines are hardening. Jonathan Haidt explores the reasons for this and has developed a pretty good theory. Even though I think there's some anti-conservative bias in there, it rings pretty true to me. What do you think?

Here he give a thumbnail sketch of the Moral Foundations Theory he has constructed for analyzing ideology:

Moral Foundations Theory, which outlines six clusters of moral concerns—care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation—upon which all political cultures and movements base their moral appeals. 

Political liberals tend to rely primarily on the moral foundation of care/harm, followed by fairness/cheating and liberty/oppression. 

Social conservatives, in contrast, use all six foundations. They are less concerned than liberals about harm to innocent victims, but they are much more concerned about the moral foundations that bind groups and nations together, i.e., loyalty (patriotism), authority (law and order, traditional families), and sanctity (the Bible, God, the flag as a sacred object).

Libertarians, true to their name, value liberty more than anyone else, and they value it far more than any other foundation. (You can read our complete research findings, including our report on libertarians, at www.MoralFoundations.org.) 

The Liberal Narrative

“Once upon a time, the vast majority of human persons suffered in societies and social institutions that were unjust, unhealthy, repressive, and oppressive. These traditional societies were reprehensible because of their deep-rooted inequality, exploitation, and irrational traditionalism.…

But the noble human aspiration for autonomy, equality, and prosperity struggled mightily against the forces of misery and oppression, and eventually succeeded in establishing modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist, welfare societies.

While modern social conditions hold the potential to maximize the individual freedom and pleasure of all, there is much work to be done to dismantle the powerful vestiges of inequality, exploitation, and repression.

This struggle for the good society in which individuals are equal and free to pursue their self-defined happiness is the one mission truly worth dedicating one’s life to achieving.”

The Conservative Narrative

The Reagan narrative goes like this:

“Once upon a time, America was a shining beacon. Then liberals came along and erected an enormous federal bureaucracy that handcuffed the invisible hand of the free market. They subverted our traditional American values and opposed God and faith at every step of the way.

…Instead of requiring that people work for a living, they siphoned money from hardworking Americans and gave it to Cadillac-driving drug addicts and welfare queens. Instead of punishing criminals, they tried to ‘understand’ them. Instead of worrying about the victims of crime, they worried about the rights of criminals.

…Instead of adhering to traditional American values of family, fidelity, and personal responsibility, they preached promiscuity, premarital sex, and the gay lifestyle…and they encouraged a feminist agenda that undermined traditional family roles.

…Instead of projecting strength to those who would do evil around the world, they cut military budgets, disrespected our soldiers in uniform, burned our flag, and chose negotiation and multilateralism.…Then Americans decided to take their country back from those who sought to undermine it.”

Reagan campaign rhetoric doesn't quite paint an equivalent narrative to the reasoned liberal one he uses, but that's a minor quibble.  He doesn't do it to denigrate those of us on the right; he does it to show how conservatives, unlike liberals, use all six foundations.

Go take the Moral Foundations Questionnaire and see how you stack up against liberals and conservatives.  Once you register, go to the "Explore your Morals" tab and scroll down past the first box of surveys where you will find the Moral Foundations Questionnaire.  

Like any survey it has it's flaws related to how respondents interpret the meaning of words, but I found it interesting.  Here are my results.  Blue is the liberal average, Red is the conservative average, and Green is my score.

When Caliban Met Ariel: Tales of the Ugly Gringo

"Latin America:  Where single men come back married, and married men come back single"  -- Kurt Silverfiddle quote

Latin America is a sexy, exotic place, from Mexico all the way to the southern tip.

In a drunken stretch of the imagination (or a Picasso-esque one), Latin America even looks like a sexy woman, twisting perhaps to a samba or merengue beat. From busty Mexico down through her slender waist of Central America, where moving south her hips blossom and enclose the steamy, verdant tropicalia before tapering down to a sexy pair of legs terminating at the tip of the Southern Cone.

I've seen many a man dash himself upon the rocks of lust in Latin America. It's never a pretty site. You have the best of intentions, but the devil lurks around every corner. The young woman cheated by the dumb and cheap Secret Service agent (never a good combination, especially in a strange place) is a saucy little firecracker. I've known a few like her, and it always ended badly...

Every now and then, something will hit the news and it will transport me back to another time and place. It's part of the curse of having lived many lives.

Mark Sanford's Argentinian Adventure

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford's slow, sad human car wreck over his Argentinian lover was gut-wrenching. Some held out hope he would snap out of it, but I knew he was a goner. Done. I had been there, mentally and physically, and I thank God I came back to reality and didn't wreck my marriage.  Prior training as a young bachelor living for years in Central America is probably all that steeled me against falling into a snare.

Sanford had been transported half a world away, in a swirl of exotic mystery and romance. He may have been standing in the harsh reality of South Carolina, complete with the blinding TV lights, clicking cameras and shouting reporters, but his heart and mind were captured and held prisoner at the other end of the world, a completely different world of sultry, sexy exotica.

A famous actress, can't remember who, talked about filming in Brazil, I think, and how the tropical atmosphere amped up your libido. She made some reference about it going straight to your groin, or something like that. All of Latin America is not tropical--in the crisp Andean air of Quito or La Paz, women wearing luxuriously feminine capes and tall leather boots is also very sexy--so it's not just the hot, moist climate.

Not So Secret Service

I've never been to Cartagena, but I was a young single man temporarily assigned just up the coast in Maracaibo, Venezuela, back before the Chavez regime.  I imagine it's about the same, complete with the humidity sinking into your loins and clouding your brain...

... A steamy tropical beach, stripped down to swimwear, sweatily dancing to salsa and merengue, afternoon "naps" when the rain comes, dancing and dining, air conditioned rooms and crisp cold sheets a luxuriant night refuge from the heat of the day, until the unforgiving sun starts it all over again...

I wasn't there, but I can describe that morning in Cartagena, when the Secret Service sex party came to a crashing end. It was dead still as only a Caribbean party town can be at that early hour of breaking dawn. An indignant female voice pierced the silence, echoing down the cool marble hall scrubbed pristine with that peculiarly-scented cleaning agent you only smell in northern South America. The crowd in the hallway grows, curious faces, hotel staff, later policia. The other gringo partiers, still dreamily in the arms of their paramours, feel their guts drop.  One guy just blew it for everybody, and the jig is up. A sharp descent from heaven to hell. Bad stuff happens fast down there.

Ugly Americans

So I wasn't really surprised by any of the news, but I was struck by the stupid, stunning arrogance of the agents. If just one of them had understood the culture and displayed more than a passing facility with the local language, it would not have blown up in their faces. If you're going to be venal and break the rules, at least be smart about it. Some prearrangements with the bar and with the hotel staff, some exchanged cash, so nothing shows up on the bill you have to submit with your travel voucher, and none of that gringo arrogance, inflated to pompous proportions by official diplomatic credentials and badges.

This did not do any damage to our country or our image. It just reinforced the stereotype. Everyone down there is laughing their asses off at us, and some marriages here in the states are probably in peril.

End Note:
* - Caliban and Ariel are two metaphorical characters in Jose Enrique Rodo's classic essay, Ariel.  If a Latin American "expert" hasn't heard of it, then beware, he is not an expert and probably got his Latin American Studies degree at the University of Taco Bell.

George Zimmerman Not Guilty

I posted a headline a few weeks ago declaring Zimmerman guilty.  I'm retracting it

I do so based upon the opinion of Alan Dershowitz as well as a discussion with a lawyer friend.

When the Florida Attorney General said politics had nothing to do with the decision to press charges, she was lying.  Political cowardice had everything to do with it.  The actions of the Sanford Police Department did call the case into question, but informed and educated critics say the affidavit is a joke, and an investigator admitted on the stand that there was no evidence to contradict Zimmerman's statement that Martin jumped him after he had turned around and headed back to his vehicle.

Prosecutor Angela Corey purposely charged him with second degree murder so they could have a show trial where Zimmerman will be found not guilty by a jury of his peers, as opposed to the DA having to announce they cannot press charges due to a lack of evidence.  This takes the heat off of the Florida political establishment while also ultimately serving justice, in a twisted way.

The prosecutors have no hard evidence, and Zimmerman is the only witness left standing.  The second degree murder standard is too high. The official medical evidence will come out showing he did suffer injuries, and the rest is based upon what he told police and his testimony on the stand.  He'll walk.

Once exonerated, Zimmerman will be sued for wrongful death, dragging this racial carnival of the grotesque out for years.

This doesn't mean he acted prudently.  He did not.  This is also not the fault of the stand your ground law, and the race shouters will continue shouting, even thought there is no evidence Zimmerman is a racist or that his actions that night were racially-motivated, let alone a "hate crime."

A Tragic Chain of Events

As in most accidents and tragedies, it took a string of bad decisions to produce the sad outcome.

1) Zimmerman got out of his vehicle.

2) Had he not been carrying a gun, would he have pursued a "suspicious" stranger in the dark?  Forgoing either one of those actions would have prevented Martin's death.

3) Zimmerman's statement, and the testimony he is prepared to present, says that he was returning to his vehicle when Martin attacked him.  Had Martin simply made haste back to his father's house, he would still be alive.

They can't convict George Zimmerman with no evidence, so I predict not guilty or a hung jury.  That doesn't mean racism doesn't exist, it doesn't mean young black men are not racially profiled, and it doesn't mean police department don't treat white adults differently than they do black adolescents.

Race hustlers, social provocateurs and even reasoned thinkers are trying to hang the sins of the world upon George Zimmerman.  Injustice cannot give birth to justice.

Mediaite - Alan Dershowitz

Why Romney Could Beat Obama

When conservatives march out old, stale issues like Obama and his family sitting in Reverend Wright’s Church of God Damn America for two decades, the liberal cognoscenti in the press quickly bat them down as trafficking in stale, trifling irrelevancies.

But when Obama’s Ploofian Axlerods dust off old stories about Mitt Romney strapping the family pooch to the top of the old station wagon, the left treats it as pure gold.

Here’s the Chicago way...

In January Obama adviser David Axelrod--not to be confused with Axelrod, the Flying A Dog--blew a dog whistle. He tweeted a photo of the president with Bo, the White House canine, in what appears to be the back seat of a limousine. Axelrod's comment: "How loving owners transport their dogs." (WSJ)

Just as the anti-Mitt meme was gaining steam for the 2012 campaign season, alert conservative pundit Jim Treacher pointed out that a young Barry Obama had eaten dog meat (Obama mentions it in his book). Well, the Romney Death Star swooped down and cast a giant shadow over the shaken Obamunists, firing this photon shot over the bow…

Romney aide Erich Fehrnstrom got into the act last night, retweeting Axelrod's Obama-Bo snapshot from January with the comment: "In retrospect, a chilling photo." (WSJ)

Even better, Obama’s mutt munching has spawned some funny jokes (all from WSJ)

#ObamaDogRecipes: Yorkshire terrier pudding, mutt chop, Pekingese duck, bichon frisee salad, beagle with cream cheese, pure bread.

"So, Mr. President, where shall we go to eat?" "I know a great Spot."

If you want a friend in Washington, don't eat him (credit to Jim Geraghty).

Happiness is a warm puppy, with a side of fries.

The Chicago gang brought a gun to the fight, and the Romney brigade shot them in the face with a cannon. Tee hee hee…

This comes on the heels of the left shooting themselves in the face fighting the phony “War on Women.” Vinegar-laced harridan Hilary Rosen declared that Ann Romney, a mother of five, had never worked a day in her life, touching off a very unwelcomed “War on Mommies.” Obama’s minions quickly threw her under the campaign bus, giving Romney another notch in his gunbelt.

A charitable reading of Rosen’s comments mostly exonerates her of intentional malice, but the left never cuts such slack to the hated rightwingers, so what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. The Romney campaign has stuffed the Obama-bots twice in the past two weeks, and the main event hasn’t even kicked off yet.

I’m looking forward to Campaign 2012.

Thoughts for the Weekend

Some random thoughts on a Friday...

Question of the Week

Who posed a greater danger to the President this past week? Ted Nugent or The Secret Service?

Every now and then, a politician slips up and tells the truth…

“A fewer and fewer number of people do very well, and everybody else is running faster and faster just to keep pace”

“The choice in this election,” said Axelrod, “is between an economy that produces a growing middle class and that gives people a chance to get ahead and their kids a chance to get ahead and an economy that continues down the road we are on.” (NY Post)

I agree with David Axelrod. Only a fool would vote to reelect President Obama and continue on the economic road to hell he's taking us down.

Humanity-Hating Left

Hardcore green warmists exhibit a malthusian angst and eugenics-tinged desire for population control. The honest global warming advocates will tell you mankind is a blight on the planet as they cheer for our extinction:

“Humans have the unfortunate distinction of being the most destructive and harmful species on earth,” he writes. “The amount of suffering in the world could be radically reduced if there were no more” of us. (Professor David Benatar, quoted in New Yorker Magazine)

I would like to point out that if man went extinct, alligators would still gobble ducks and swans, fish would still eat one another, raptors would continue to swoop down and kill cute little birdies and furry rodents, weasels and snakes would not stop feasting on eggs, monkeys would still battle one another with sticks and stones, male animals would keep on forcibly copulating with females, elk and deer would still die of starvation in winter, black widows would continue to bite the heads off of their mates once the fun was over, animals would continue polluting the atmosphere by emitting methane gas, and lightning would still start forest fires.

For a further Warmest Alarmist reality check, see The Limits of The Limits of Growth. It features 40-year-old predictions by the egghead worry warts of the early 70's, armed with statistical models from MIT, (MIT! The science is settled!). Every indicator they predicted would get worse has gotten better.

Have a happy and blessed weekend!

A Mosque or a Church?

Spain is home to Cathedrals that were once mosques, and European Muslims are asking for their houses of worship back. I'm sympathetic to their cause. After all, the Christians aren't using them, except as musty museums that attract tourist dollars.

American Christians are un­usual in that their churches rarely occupy sites sacred to other faiths. But throughout history new religions often appropriated older sacred places for their own purposes. London's St. Paul's Cath­edral stands over the re­mains of a pagan temple, and the Metro­politan Cathedral in Mexico City is within the sacred pre­cinct of Aztec Tenoch­titlán. Invaders normally as­sumed that dominant religions should by right occupy the greatest buildings, and they grabbed sites ac­cord­ingly.

Such displacements are much in evidence across Europe and the Middle East, where Christians and Muslims often battled each other and where frontiers shifted frequently. (Whose Holy Ground)

The non-practicing Europeans who won't cede ground to Muslim worshipers remind me of an older child stubbornly clinging to a toy even though he has outgrown it. Here's an idea. Hold a contest to see who can get more people to show up to the building, Catholics or Muslims. Whoever produces the bigger crowd wins the property.

The author of the article just wants to let sleeping dogs lie, and ends with a question...

And what would happen if Christians tried to recover the many former churches in the Middle East that are now Islamicized?

What would happen? The Islamists would cut their heads off.

And that’s the difference between us and them. It is telling that while Christians cower in fear all over the Muslim world, prey to burnings, bombings and murder, Muslims in the west freely exercise their religion and bring their cultural and religious practices to the public square without fear of violence.

Meanwhile, here's a cool story about a brave Muslim Voice for European Christianity.

Government-Sponsored Inequality

Envy and Equality are recurring themes in Left Blogistan...

Shaw Kenawe is the latest to address it, and she does it in her usual expert way.  We rarely agree, but I respect her.

She opens her post by asking:

"Do We Really Want to Become a Third World Country?

Incredibly, we're on our way to that sorry situation because of our income inequality--the highest since before the Great Depression"

There are two sides to every story.  Of course we have income and wealth inequality.  What society in the entire history of the planet does not?  Are the rich making their gains at the expense of the poor? Studies have not shown that.

Inequality in Perspective

Matt Zwolinski at Bleeding Heart Libertarians does a good job putting it all in perspective. He goes point by point, and I won't reprint them here, but there is context behind the raw numbers that includes changing factors like household size, education, and immigration.

We are also an economically mobile society, with people moving both up and down. We commoners also enjoy a cornucopia of luxuries that were only available to the rich back in the 50's. Most measures of inequality also fail to take into account the direct government transfer payments to the poor in the form of food, housing and cash assistance.

Income inequality is a natural result of a free market where people of various skills participate and bring products of various values into it. The services of a doctor or plumber are more valuable than those of a janitor, so doctors and plumbers enjoy greater remuneration than janitors.

A Tale of Two Liberals

Inequality?  Try this on for size:  OWS protesters were swept up and jailed in cities all over America for the misdemeanor of stinking up the place and refusing to pack up their tents. Meanwhile, well-connected liberal Democrat Jon Corzine walks free and easy after "misplacing" billions of investor dollars. You can bet he's not nervously looking over his shoulder--Washington's got his back.

The real inequality problem we have is caused by government. Rich people, big biz, big education, big pharma and wealthy financiers now own the US government. Having bought and paid for it, these rent-seekers are enjoying the best government money can buy, while the rest of us are subject to Big Sis Brigades wanding our crotches and confiscating our possessions.

The Silverfiddle Solution

In good times and bad, high taxation and low, federal government revenue collection averages about 17% of GDP per year. We need to design the federal government around that number. Collapsing useless departments like Education, HUD, Labor and selling the buildings would be a good start.  Shrinking and combining the remaining gargantuan tangle of departments and agencies would be a good next step.  Budget to that 17% target every year and cut what don't fit. It's what responsible states do.

Set a flat tax. Wipe out all exemptions, incentives and special favors for everybody, across the board, and call off the regulatory hounds that only the rich can afford to keep at bay. Burn down the Code of Federal Regulations and restore the rule of law so that the law is understandable by all and applicable to all.

Cut away the comfy taxpayer-provided safety nets protecting the phony captains of industry. A system that welds the escape hatches shut, forcing them to pay for their irresponsibility and malfeasance, will do more to tame the gamblers and pirates than the libraries full of regulations we now have.

Get the government out of health care and education. These are the two markets most penetrated by government, and not coincidentally, the two most inefficient markets with the greatest rates of inflation.

We need economic liberty and an education system that is not gouging us at every turn. As Hayek reminded us, it is a fatal conceit to believe that since we can't imagine our economic future, the government must plan it. There lies failure. Entrepreneurship is the way out.

Walter Russel Mead explains the way out of this mess much more intelligently than I do. Please go read Post-Blue Jobs pt 2.

Holman Jenkins has a handy rebuttal to the Income Inequality charge as well:  The Inequality Obsession

Boomer Bust

I have often thought that ten years of war would get us past the baby boomer mindset and forge a new generation of leaders: Non-ideological, with the ability to face problems head on and to do what works. That is what troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan had to do. Military experience in a war zone (even for support guys like me) involves seeing the situation as it really is, and then doing whatever needs to be done to overcome. Nobody in Washington knows how to do that.

Here's a voice from America's next Greatest Generation:

"I have fully lost faith in the leadership of my parents’ generation."

They have had their time to lead. Time’s up. I’m tired of waiting for them to live up to obligations. (War vet Thomas Day, Quoted by WRM - Listen Up Boomers)

The baby boomers burst onto the leadership scene in 1992 with the election of Bill Clinton. George W. Bush did his part to further besmirch that generation, and Obama is it's narcissistic, useless apotheosis.

Not every baby boomer is blameworthy. In fact, most of them never protested a war, smoked pot or indulged in any of the other tie-dyed, patchouli-tinged hippy-dippy hoopla that generation is infamous for. Like their parents before them, they went to work, raised families and contributed to their communities, so all of our problems cannot be laid at the feet of the boomers.

Some of our ills stem from the WW II-era's unquestioning respect for authority and hero-worship. "The Greatest Generation" can also be blamed for pampering and swaddling it's boomer progeny, shielding them from every hardship, ill and trial that shaped the rock-hard depression-era and WW II generation into such an impressive cohort of Americans.

Unfortunately for the majority, a small minority has defined the Baby Boomer Generation

The movie The Big Chill foisted the boomers upon our consciousness, with it's whiney navel-gazing, self-indulgent introspection and narcissistic cultural chauvinism, and the cultural boomers have been wearing out their welcome ever since.

This is the generation that brought us Viagra commercials on TV during family hours, introducing our youngsters to new and interesting phrases for physiological phenomena that last for more that four hours. This is the generation that mainstreamed porn, marketed slutwear to our daughters and encouraged our boys to be pimps. They taught us to feel, not think, and to put self-esteem above actual achievement.

I know, boomers are not the authors of our current social dysfunctions, but they were the libertines who stormed Bastille, unleashing the corrosive social forces that made these dysfunctions possible. Then as grownups they agnostically market this trash to the masses in worship of the almighty dollar.

We are now suffering the ill effects of the "anything goes, if it feels good do it" culture this adolescent, incontinent generation has foisted upon us. Our political, social and religious institutions are crumbling. The level of vulgarity in everyday life is unprecedented and our inflated sense of egotistical self-entitlement knows no bounds. Instead of building upon the foundation of the Greatest Generation, boomers took a bulldozer to it and left a giant Woodstock-like mud pit in its place.

Baby Boomer Richard Berry blames them for the economic crash as well...

The current market turmoil is a product of every bad trait the Boomer Elite has long exhibited in other social and political contexts: unbridled greed and hubris, exorbitant self-regard, breathtaking recklessness, insatiable appetite for immediate gratification, and a rollicking sense of entitlement.Our efforts to be responsible citizens in this crisis are ridiculed and shouted down: exclude from the bail-out the pork and the payoffs to interest groups? How dare we! Include measures that might actually spur badly needed growth in the tough times now surely coming, like cuts in capital gains and corporate taxes? Leave the room!

This is all merely typical of the smug, cocksure Boomer Elite. This is a group that breaks things. It has set the wrecking ball to institutions that are the essential glue of our society (marriage and the family), the basis of our political system (federalism and the separation of powers), the engine of our prosperity (the free market), the guarantor of our freedom (the military), and the glory of our history (the Constitution, participatory democracy). (The Great Boomer Comeuppance)

We haven't heard the last of the Boomers, even as they shuffle off to hippie Valhalla retirements planned by their parents and funded by the greatest transfer of wealth from young to old in the history of the world.

My hope is that subsequent generations give them their due for the good they have done while learning from their mistakes.

It's Not Fair!

Equality of Outcomes is Un-American.  It would require enforced unfairness and a violation of our personal liberties...

Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different, but are in conflict with one another; and we can achieve one or the other, but not both at the same time. (F.A Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, pg 150)

We are all different people, with different goals and behaviors.  Enforcing an equality of outcomes would require a tyrannical government imposing its vision on us all and treating each of us very unequally under the law.

Thomas Sowell echoes Friedrich Hayek as he punctures the chimerical argument of forced equality:

The latest example of this hoax is the joint crusade of the Department of Education and the Department of Justice against schools that discipline black males more often than other students. According to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, this disparity in punishment violates the "promise" of "equity."

Just who made this promise remains unclear, and why equity should mean equal outcomes despite differences in behavior is even more unclear. (Sowell – The Big Hoax)

Sowell goes on to explain that it would be wrong to unfairly single out a particular group, but there is no evidence of that in the case of school punishment.  But why let facts get in the way of a feel good crusade?

Inequality really bugs some people:

It is not fair that LeBron James has a 40-inch vertical leap, and we have a 4-inch vertical leap (combined). It is not fair that some have high IQs, and others are below average. It is not fair that Christie Brinkley is beautiful, that some people are born with photographic memories, that one person gets cancer and the next one doesn't.

We Americans were born in a land of opportunity and wealth, while billions around the world are born into poverty and squalor. We won the ultimate lottery of life just by being born in this great and rich country. Where is the justice in that? (The Poverty of Equality)

What is the definition of "Fair Share?"

As for fairness, the wealthy already pay more than a fair share (the top 1 percent of income earners make 16 percent of income but pay nearly 40 percent of federal income taxes) ... (Let's hope that Obama doesn't start getting technical about "fairness," because the plutocrats would be in for a huge tax break.) (Harsanyi - Obama's "Fairness" Fiction)

Misguided do-gooders among us claim that if we could just make the "haves" of this world pay their "fair share," we could achieve "social justice." The OWS agitators claim that everyone should receive a wage regardless of whether they work or not, and it would presumably be funded by doubling the tax on "the rich."

 They talk of "equitably distributing the wealth," as if it were in a big community pot that belonged to all of us, or the government, depending on the propaganda narrative.

"THIS IS WHY it is wrong to even speak of the "distribution" of income and wealth. Income and wealth are not distributed. Income and wealth are created, and in a fair society they come into the world attached to the rightful owner that produced them." (The Poverty of Equality)

A quick lesson from the real world:

During the era of communism in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, when all land was cultivated for the "common good" and food was evenly distributed to all, regardless of how much one worked, China produced way too little food, and many millions of people, including children, starved to death.

But then, starting in the 1980s, agricultural reforms began to emerge that allowed farmers to take a small plot of land and keep the food they grew. An amazing thing happened. Production of food on these very small tracts surged multiples higher than the output on the communal lands. The Chinese farmers saw output double and even triple from the previous arrangement where all food was put in a communal pot. Private ownership of the farms led to a green revolution, and China quickly became a food exporter. (The Poverty of Equality)

It's axiomatic. Free-market meritocracies work; spread-the-wealth autocracies do not. Capitalism has lifted over a half-billion Chinese out of poverty since 1981. But like water and electricity, human beings will take the path of least resistance. Envy, "that most anti-social and odious of all passions," is now easier to traffic in here in America than legitimate economic free-enterprise that has proven time and again to elevate one's station and to enrich societies.

What we're wanting in America is not some nebulous "fairness," "fair shares," "social justice," or, heaven forbid, equality of outcomes.  We are wanting economic liberty, equality before the law, and a permanent wall of separation between government and the rent-seekers of all stripes, corporate or otherwise.  Given a level playing field, mom and pop could compete with Walmart.

For a short and surprisingly snarky take on economic equality in America, read former FDIC chairman Shiela Bair's modest proposal to fix income inequality.

See also Winning the Fight on Fairness

Nietzsche is Dead, Jesus Lives

A common mistake I hear people make is to say Jesus was not judgmental...

He stopped the stoning of the woman caught in adultery, he blessed the woman at the well who had so many husbands, and he ate and and drank with tax collectors and sinners.

Yes, he did all those things, and he did them out of love and mercy in order to get people to repent and change their ways.  The New Testament is full of stories of him forgiving; outraging the Pharisaically-minded by giving away forgiveness.  Giving it away!  But such episodes invariably end with some command of repentance such as "go and sin no more."  So he was judgmental, but he preached repentance, a sorrow for past sins and a firm resolve to not return to them.

A philosopher names Jesus...

Religious liberals have been raving for decades about conservative Christians who think they have the market cornered, and I can understand their anger.  To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, God is not on anybody's "side."  We mortals hope and pray that we are on his side.  A smaller subset of religious progressives take it even further:

“The ‘death of God’ is a metaphor. We needed to redefine Christianity as a possibility without the presence of God.” The “possibility” here is a moral, not a transcendent one. (Death of a Theologian)

There are some who would strip Jesus of his divinity and make him a wisdom guru as they perform a Jeffersonian excision of his miracles from the gospel narratives.  What that leaves them with is a stern, crusading progressive-era morality of social justice with which to beat conservatives over the heads in a nice turn of vengeful religious zealotry devoid of all the superstition.

The Death of God Theology

They all agreed that the traditional God of the Biblical tradition was no longer credible. Hamilton believed that Christians should forget about the hope of heaven, instead concentrate on understanding this world and doing good in it, thus presumably following the moral teachings of Jesus.

He understood the death of God as a cosmic process of God’s emptying himself into the world he created; an ancient Christian term for this has been the kenosis of God, his voluntary humiliation in order to redeem the fallen world. Altizer saw the culminating of the kenosisin the crucifixion of Jesus—at which point God merges with the natural world and no longer confronts it as a transcendent being. (Death of a Theologian)

"Their god is God" -- Pharoah, The Ten Commandments

Andrew Sullivan longs for a simpler, more spiritual Christianity in this age of corrupt hierarchies and the politicization of everything. I can sympathize, but Father Robert Barron provides a rebuttal to Sullivan's sighing for a gauzy, more nebulous Christianity. 

Barron zoomed in on Sullivan's favorable mention of Thomas Jefferson's Gospel edits that removed all mention of the supernatural:

Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle, to give just two examples among many, present Jesus, not as the God-man risen from the dead, but rather as a New Age guru.

The first problem with this type of theorizing is that it has little to do with the New Testament. As Jefferson's Bible makes clear, the excision of references to the miraculous, to the resurrection, and to the divinity of Jesus delivers to us mere fragments of the Gospels.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were massively interested in the miracles and exorcisms of Jesus and they were positively obsessed with his dying and rising. The Gospels have been accurately characterized as "passion narratives with long introductions."

Further, the earliest Christian texts that we have are the epistles of St. Paul, and in those letters that St. Paul wrote to the communities he founded, there are but a tiny handful of references to the teaching of Jesus. What clearly preoccupied Paul was not the moral doctrine of Jesus, but the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. (Andrew Sullivan's Non-Threatening Jesus)

I Believe

Jack Camwell mocked my belief in Satan, but yes, I really believe he is "The God of this World." Both the Old Testament and New Testament contain too many accounts of him, including him speaking, to just discount it as a silly superstition or mental illness.  It's a complete package.  Good and Evil.  Divine and Mortal.  Practical and Mysterious.

Strip it of the evil, the divine, and the mysterious, and all you have left is a sterile, didactic set of ambiguous rules that men use to torment one another with.

Road Trippin'

There's something calming about a long stretch of road heading west...

Leaving Albuquerque for Arizona on I40 you see some cool, stereotypical southwest scenery, complete with painted mesas backstopped by blue sky and snow capped mountains mixed in with a whole lotta nothin.'  Country oldies and The Grateful Dead provide a great musical backdrop.

I'd spent the night before jamming with some old friends at a dusty VFW outside of Bernalillo.  The crowd was big and rowdy and my old friend's band was wound up tight. Charlie had a little too much too drink and kept turning his bass up too loud, but he was hitting all the notes and it was all good.

They called me up for one song and I ended up doing three sets with them. Hootin' and hollerin' Honky Tonk, 70's and 80's rock, cry in your beer country classics and anything else that struck our fancy. The bar was hot and almost suffocating. I sweated through my stetson in under an hour, making me wish I had brought my straw. It was only a little smoky. Don't know if people were smoking because technically it was a private establishment, or because it was New Mexico and nobody gives a damn.

I left hoarse, beer-soaked and bourbon buzzed, fingertips sore and high on life. I hadn't performed on stage in front of a big crowd in years. It was awesome. Moreso because I didn't have to break down the equipment and haul it home at the end of the night.

I love the southwest; scorpions, snakes, cowboys and indians and all.  And I've been over a good piece of it.  Some of my favorite traveling music includes The Doors, especially LA Woman and Morrison Hotel, The Last Waltz, and Neil Young.  The Dead is also an excellent road companion.

My favorite drives include I-70 heading East from Green River Utah, up and over the Rockies to Denver; Boulder Canyon to Nederland and on up to Estes Park via highway 7; I-40 from Albuquerque through Arizona, and I-10 going up the mountains, through Palm Springs and down into LA.  Driving across Wyoming can also be a peaceful relaxing ride, with perhaps some Lyle Lovett, Jayhawks, or Neil Young keeping you company.

What are your favorite drives and what do you listen to when you're on the road?