Category: Uncategorized

Vox, I have been faithfully praying for your nephew Andrew since you asked, and have been wondering about how he is doing. If you would just give me a quick update I would know how to more adequately pray on his behalf.

My cousin emailed me the following four days ago:

Andrew finished his second round of chemo with flying colors! He is now resting up in the hospital waiting for his ANC (immune system) to come back up. This will take a week to two weeks. Luckily this time he was able to venture out more with a mask on which kept his spirits up! Thank you everyone for your continued support and generosity!

Also, I’d appreciate it if those regulars who are readers would pray for a little boy who is undergoing minor surgery to remove a cyst on his neck tomorrow. It’s a simple procedure and every indication is that it’s nothing to be concerned about, but no surgery is minor surgery in a parent’s eyes.

I suspect we’ll be hearing more from Dr. Ken Hutchinson in the future. The NYT is already complaining of him:

Dr. Hutcherson is known for publicly chastising and excommunicating members if he finds out they are sinning, calling adulterers, for example, up to the pulpit and demanding they repent, congregants said.

“And if they don’t want to repent of it, he’ll let them know that this is not the church for you,” said John Stachofsky, 42, a longtime friend of Dr. Hutcherson and a member of the church who goes bird and deer hunting with him.

Ach du lieber! A church leader who follows Biblical teachings! What outrage shall be inflicted next upon the helpless secularists of America, a Catholic Pope?

Paul Gallagher describes a deleted scene from THE INCREDIBLES:

The setting is a backyard barbeque in their neighborhood. Helen Parr is introduced to Beth, a commodities broker. Beth talks excitedly about her job, then asks what Helen does. “I’m a homemaker,” Helen replies. Blank stare from Beth, who cuts off Helen’s next sentence with a curt, “That’s nice.” Beth walks off, and Helen scowls.

A minute later, Helen overhears Beth talking to some other neighbors:

Beth: “Throw away my prime years trailing after a bunch of snotty kids? No, thank you! Hello, no thanks! Hello, I want to do something with my life!”
Helen: “Wait a minute! You consider raising a family … nothing?”
Beth: “Well, it’s fine if you’re not suited for more substantial things.”
Helen: “Do you have any idea how much suffering would fail to take root if more people were just good parents? What’s more important than that? What kind of job?”
Beth: “Uh … uh …”
Helen: “A job saving lives? Is that important? What about risking my life?”
Beth: “Well, I … uh …”
Helen: “What about confronting evil on a daily basis for years so that people like you can sleep in safety and security? Would you consider that kind of job ‘substantial’?”
Beth: “Yeah. I would. Yes.”
Helen: “Well, that’s the job I gave up for my new job — raising a family. And nobody’s going to tell me it’s any less important.”

Wow. Let’s take a moment to let that sink in. We have a hero in a major film defending the job of homemaker. Rewind it all you like. Then notice the sky’s not falling. And if you think I liked it, imagine how my wife, Cindy — a homemaker and mother of six — felt about it.

Or how the director’s wife felt about it. Brad Bird said he included the scene because it reflected what his own wife encountered every time they went to a social function. People who found it easy to chat with others who worked outside the home felt awkward and didn’t know what to say when they met this strange creature who called herself … a homemaker.

Perhaps the cultural pendulum is beginning to swing back a bit. I’ve noticed that even on hard core feminist blogs, feminists are finding themselves caught on the defensive as they frantically deny that feminism could possibly about dissing homemakers.

This doesn’t say much for the historical knowledge of their own feminist history – surprise, surprise – but it does speak volumes about what is no longer acceptable. Which is to say, the anti-homemaker ideology of Simone de Beauvoir and many leading feminists who openly wished to deny women the possibility of life as a wife and mother.

Via Drudge:

A Georgia bride-to-be who vanished just days before her wedding turned up in New Mexico and fabricated a tale of abduction before admitting Saturday that she got cold feet and “needed some time alone,” police said. Jennifer Wilbanks, 32, was in police custody more than 1,420 miles from her home on what was supposed to be her wedding day Saturday.

“It turns out that Miss Wilbanks basically felt the pressure of this large wedding and could not handle it,” said Randy Belcher, the police chief in Duluth, Ga., the Atlanta suburb where Wilbanks lives with her fiance. He said there would be no criminal charges.

Wilbanks had called her fiance, John Mason, from a pay phone late Friday and told him that she had been kidnapped three days earlier while jogging, authorities said. Her family rejoiced that she was safe, telling reporters that the media coverage apparently got to the kidnappers.

And since everyone feels sorry for the poor psycho, she apparently won’t face any charges. No wonder women feel that they can lie with impunity about being raped, kidnapped or sexually harassed… they seldom face any consequences for it.

As a corollary to this, any racial incident occurring on campus will almost always prove to have been concocted by the victim. Was anyone actually surprised when it turned out that what the Chicago Sun-Times was calling “the Trinity crisis” turned out to be completely fabricated by a black female student there?

Western Self-Loathing, or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Jihad
by Animate Matters

As you all know, Vox gets a bit twitchy on Saturdays, what with sundry viruses accumulating in his CPU. So he’s out having his brainbox upgraded and cleaned, and his servomechanisms lubricated. But never fear; he should be back in fighting trim for tomorrow.

By a cruel jest of fate manifest through the clicking of dice, his dear readers have been afflicted with my rantings as his inaugural guest blogger. May my words be buoyant millstones as you flounder in the cyber sea.

Without further ado, let’s discuss the Crusades and the Islamic Jihad. We’ll take a unique tack, addressing these events from a historical perspective, rather than that of a leftist soundbite.

First the Jihad. Upon Muhammed’s death in A.D. 632, Muslims controlled much of the Arabian Peninsula, including Palestine. This trend of expansion continued under his successors, the caliphs. A century after his passing, Muslims had conquered territory stretching from Afghanistan to Spain. Portions of India, Anatolia (ancient Asia Minor or modern Turkey), Sudan, and the Balkans fell under Islamic ascendancy. It’s important to point out that this imperialism and proselytization with the sword was a continuation of Muhammed’s own tactics–not a deviation from his grand scheme. The ultimate goal of Jihad was and is Islamic domination of the planet through Sharia law.

Why the history lesson? Because it sheds light on the motivations behind the Crusades. When Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade in 1095, the Islamic Jihad against the West already had been an unrelenting plague for over 460 years. If one understands nothing else about the Crusades, one should realize that they were not imperialistic wars of aggression against peaceful easterners–but a response to centuries of blood-soaked conquest instigated by the Islamic world. Finally suppressing age-old petty rivalries and internal bickering (to a degree), European Christians mustered the will for bringing a halt to Muslim expansion, and a reoccupying of the Holy Land–stolen centuries before.

Militaristic and religious aspects of the Crusades cannot be divorced. Not just exercises in revenge and reclamation, they entailed the qualities of a pilgrimage. Some went on crusade as an act of penance; others for the receipt of indulgences; still others for a tiny glimpse of the past home of Jesus and his disciples. Rationales were as diverse as the people themselves. Most crusaders were poor folk sincerely seeking God’s will, knowing that months if not years would pass before laying eyes on their loved ones, again. Many departed expecting never to return to the lands of their birth.

Don’t misunderstand me. This isn’t a defense of the Crusades. Both sides perpetrated atrocities against innocent people. Neither was of sterling character or saintly guise.

But an accurate rendition of the Crusades rarely is offered for public consumption. In the past fifty years or so, the mainstream media, certain Islamophile historians, popular television programs, the public indoctrination machines (euphemistically known as “schools“), and even U.S. presidents have utterly mischaracterized the Crusades.

Examples–

From a U.S. News headline: “The Truth About the Epic Clash Between Christianity and Islam,” followed by “During the Crusades, East and West first met.” The article continues by proclaiming the Crusades “The First Holy War.” Later, it suggests that “For Muslims, imperialism is a dirty word.“ Of course, all of this demonstrably is false.

After 9/11, Bill Clinton remarked: “Indeed, in the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it, and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple mound…. I can tell you that that story is still being told today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it.”

Though it contains a kernel of truth, this observation lacks even a glimmer of historical context.

I see manifold reasons for such comments. Multiculturalism, ignorance, western self-loathing, hatred toward Christianity, disassociation from reality, and perhaps even heavy drug use all contribute to this mentality.

Most people blissfully go about their lives, hindered by a PC wall from seeing the ramifications of modern terrorism. And yet the Jihad continues–sometimes in sporadic fits; sometimes with grim monotony–an engine of destruction chugging onward.

Osama bin Laden’s World Islamic Front subcategorizes itself as a “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders,” and issued a fatwa to that effect, in 1998.

Osama understands that the Jihad is alive and kicking.

Even if we don’t.

And to paraphrase the Muslim philosopher, Avicenna, “To make the whole world Islamic, you first have to break a few infidels.”

Note – Just to be clear, I will continue posting on Saturdays. I do not intend to post commentary on the guest blogs, for the most part, and I prefer to let those discussions be led by the guest blogger himself.

On why there are so few female columnists:

Ayad Allawi, the Shiite who was supposed to keep the government secular and bring in Sunnis to blunt the insurgency, has been marginalized. That leaves the government to be ruled by men rooted in the sort of conservative Shiite religious politics that will not produce a new dawn of equality for Iraqi women….

The bad news: This is not an Iraqi government that will practice Athenian democracy or end the insurgency. The other bad news: If Dr. Jaafari falls, Ahmad Chalabi will be there to pick up the pieces.

This is exceptionally dumb, even by Dowd’s low standards. Because as anyone with even a loose grasp on history knows, women didn’t vote in the Athenian democracy. And considering how much Democrats like Ms Dowd loathe the decentralizing power of general referendums, it’s highly doubtful that she’d approve of the Ecclesia, in which any male citizen was allowed to speak and propose legislation. Or, for that matter, of the Solonic reforms, which in addition to formally dividing Athenians into economic classes, made wealth the prime criterion for holding office.

Finally, I doubt that the new Iraqi government will be able to legally execute citizens of whom it disapproves on the mere basis of philosophical opposition. Apparently Ms Dowd has never heard of a certain philosopher, who was executed at the instigation of Athens’ pro-democracy faction subsequent to the anti-democratic turmoil wrought by his two prize students.

I would be remiss if I failed to point out that in the same column Ms Dowd also complains about the Bush Administration’s secret plan to benefit its oil-industry patrons with high oil prices, in direct contradiction to the left’s previous no-blood-for-oil argument which posited LOW oil prices as the real reason for the Iraqi invasion.

It would stand to reason that there aren’t many female columnists in the media today because their role model and standard bearer is a clueless, hysterical and historically ignorant waste of space.

The Crystal Lake Observatory is next week’s guest blogger of the week. Please note that I have decided to kick the limit up to 1,000 words, so have them into me by Friday, May 6.

By the way, I was surprised at how few people managed to follow the directions on volunteering this week. If you’re interested in blog starring next week, please recall that you need to be one of the Voxologisti from the blog roll down and to the right. Also, you need to submit the name of your blog, as I don’t keep track of what belongs to who.

If you’re not a regular reader and you’ve got something to say, however critical, just email me. Blog starring is for the regulars, both fans and critics, although a survey of the archives should demonstrate that I’m happy to post detailed point-counterpoints on those rare occasions when a critic can manage to actually scrabble together some semblance of an argument instead of drawing randomly from the usual grab-bag of wild-eyed assertions that I am a Mega Stupid Poopyhead who is scared of Strong Independent Women and can’t get chicks even though my Daddy is rich because I use a pen name designed to hide my secret gayness and bitter envy of Robert Jordan, Liam Howlett and Michelle Malkin. Or something.

This is the call for next weekend’s Guest Blogger. All Voxologisti are eligible with the exception of Animate Matters. Toss the name of your blog in the hat and the red dice of determination will decide….

JJ finds a new home:

Leftist/socialist Christianity has always been a pet peeve of mine. If even an atheist libertarian can see certain basic truths of God’s world (even if not all), then the Christian socialists are at best misguided syncretists with a godless philosophy, or at worst rubes of Satan.

I’ve got to grit my teeth when people bring up the Acts verse “…they lived together and shared everything…” without understanding the context or results (especially multiplying those results by about a million people).

Why grit your teeth? Next time, burst into tears, smile like a Hare Krishna on good hashish, give them a big hug and tell them that you just have to get a few things together before you’ll be over at “our” house by seven o’clock.

Then ask if they have any underwear you can wear. Tell them you prefer thongs.