Saturday mornings this time of year find me working the floor of the gymnasium at our church in Midland, offering halftime devotionals during Upward Basketball games. I was inspired to prepare this week’s devotional by looking into the eyes of a Heisman Trophy-winning, All American college football quarterback, Tim Tebow. [Read more →]
Having lived many years in Massachusetts, I’ve taken special interest in Tuesday’s election to replace the recently-deceased Edward Kennedy. I even listened to a debate of the three candidates.
What I heard from the two major hopefuls was not surprising. Martha Coakley is an uninspiring run-of-the mill liberal; and her equally dull opponent, Scott Brown, is your standard-issue neocon. What was surprising — or, should I say, who was surprising — was the third candidate, libertarian Joe Kennedy (no relation to the late patriarch), who’s running as an independent. [Read more →]
As a former sailor who served on a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War, I was pleased to learn that the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson has arrived off the coast of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti.
The carrier is “on station” and has begun to provide humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations for the victims of the devastating earthquake.
We are reliably informed that our dogs do not love or even admire us and in any event we should not get too fond of them as they have the carbon footprint of a daily grilled cheese sandwich so we will shortly have to steam them up in a solar cooker anyhow. But this counts the costs without examining the benefit. Beyond the sentimental value of these Furbearing Americans they also do many jobs other Americans refuse and immigrants lack the communication skills for such as sniffing out bombs or pulling the Palin family sleigh. But you don’t have to be a narco officer, a professional musher or blind to benefit from canine participation in our lives. That includes our suave and over-burdened President. [Read more →]
I’d like to start this post with full disclosure. I still eat beef occasionally but I struggle with it and I am working towards a meatless diet. I have come to accept that consuming four legged animals is quite simply bad for our health and bad for our environment. In terms of environmental pollution, the meat industry is worse than cars, planes, and all other forms of transportation put together. A 2006 UN Report says that raising cattle for human consumption is the greatest threat to our climate, forests, and wildlife. I feel pretty ridiculous going through the motions of environmentalism (recycling my plastics and newspapers, changing my light bulbs, carrying around a cloth grocery bag, limiting how much I use my car, etc..), while still committing the greatest sin of them all…eating beef.
Section. 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution
Here at the research station where I live and work, we’re putting together a forest management demonstration for use in many of our community education and out-reach programs. We’re going to try to highlight several of the most common methods of managing a stand of mixed pine and upland oak/hickory forest being grown in the Ozark mountains and foothills, including installing a shelterwood, performing a timber stand improvement (select cutting), clear cutting followed immediately by a replanting to pine, and then converting one block of timber away from mixed hardwood/pine to just hardwood, and to another block, the reverse. These blocks will further be treated with a combination of chemical culling of non-merchantable trees and a controlled burn to remove the forest understory and create a germination bed.
It was while I was out cutting dead snags off the fire line today, with nothing else but the long familiar refrains of a singing Stihl to occupy my mind, that I had the following thoughts and observations.
Years are full of memories. Memories are full of people. People are full of shit. Shit is heralded by farts: some clear and crisp, others murky and wet. Yeah, everyone farts, but not like this. [Read more →]
What kind of a parent does their kids’ homework for them? Like, actually does it for them, not helps. It seems to be an ongoing struggle for parents these days. I read an interesting piece by Sue Shellenbarger on The Juggle last week. I guess it’s kind of like this whole Keeping Up with the Steins mentality. Parents want their children to succeed, and heaven forbid they aren’t holding their own against their peers. So one parent starts and another gets wind of it and before you know it, you’ve got a bunch of 40-year-olds sitting at the kitchen table with rubber cement, a shoe box, modeling clay and construction paper — while their kids are in the den playing Grand Theft Auto on PS3. Yeah. That’ll get ’em into college. [Read more →]
I was sitting around (in Africa still) having yet another great conversation with a friend of mine, Rob. It went something like this (any facts I get wrong are a result of my faulty memory and not a lie on Rob’s part):
Rob: “So I noticed you’re wearing a Matix T-shirt”
Me: “Yeah. Funny thing is, I don’t know where I got it. I didn’t buy it. And someone, I don’t know whom, sent it to me. But I liked it and so I’m wearing it. Why? Who are they?”
Rob: “Every pair of pants I own are made by Matix. They are a great grassroots company that I used to work for. I trust them.” [Read more →]
There are not enough fingers out there to count the many, many ways, big and small, that Christians are finding to share the Word of God, and the love of God, with others. It’s a shame, really, that so much time and space — that ANY time and space — will be devoted to this expression of God’s love from televangelist Pat Robertson.
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In my recent column I argued that disillusioned conservatives and libertarians should focus on transforming the Republican Party and taking it back from its ineffectual leaders, its special interest groups, and its Pat Robertson types. In case you weren’t convinced, Mr. Robertson himself has just helped to prove my point.
In response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti that has claimed tens if not hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, Robertson casually opines that Haiti has been “cursed” because it “swore a pact to the devil” during the early 19th century. Yes, I’m serious. Watch for yourself.
Until recently my favorite piece of Obama kitsch was unquestionably the mind-blowing, bizarre paintings of the president naked, astride a unicorn, fighting a naked Sarah Palin or wrestling with a fat, naked Rush Limbaugh. If you have never seen them then I urge you to waste no more time and click on this link. the images will be seared onto your retinas forever. [Read more →]
January 6, 2010
I dream I am trying to park near a viewing. There are no parking spaces, so I go instead to the simulcast at the local racino. As I watch on video the throngs of people walking by the casket, I sob uncontrollably. I start to play a slot machine, but an attendant removes my chair. I say “If you remove the chair, I’ll remove my money.” He removes the chair anyway. I cash out, but instead of my money a bunch of oddly shaped cookies pours out. I look for a place to cash in my cookies and I wind up in the kiddie area where a family sings songs from Evita in four part harmony.
I read this graphic novel last night at Barnes and Noble while waiting for my friend to show up. It was short, about under 100 pages, mostly filled with gun fights and explosions. Yet, the experience was satisfying enough for me to seriously consider buying comics based on other canceled shows I enjoyed; specifically Futurama. [Read more →]
The Nancy Meyers fantasy of an almost 60-year-old women being pursued by two attractive men near her age is pretty simple and somewhat predictable. But how can you not like a film in which Meryl Streep (Jane) gets to say, “Turns out I’m a bit of a slut.” Oh yeah, and she gets to be a slut with Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin. As unrealistic romantic comedies go, It’s Complicated isn’t, but it is a whole lot of fun, mostly due to the performances of the three leads. [Read more →]
Oh, SNAP!
But the final irony is that many of the detainees may not even want to be transferred to Thomson and could conceivably even raise their own legal roadblocks to allow them to stay at Gitmo.
Falkoff notes that many of his clients, while they clearly want to go home, are at least being held under Geneva Convention conditions in Guantánamo. At Thomson, he notes, the plans call for them to be thrown into the equivalent of a “supermax” security prison under near-lockdown conditions.
“As far as our clients are concerned, it’s probably preferable for them to remain at Guantánamo,” he says.
At the end of an excellent blog by Michael Isikoff, over at Newsweek.
Recently, President Obama signed an Executive Order immunizing the five-person Interpol office in New York City from a handful of federal laws.
Gadzooks!
Ronald Reagan, in a 1975 interview with Reason Magazine on the state of the Republican party, said that “the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.”
Today, despite the prescience of the Gipper, a rumble is growing in many free market, small government circles — a lurking sense that the two major parties in this country just aren’t cutting it. A new and fired up brand of conservatives, libertarians, constitutionalists, and tea partiers want something new. They feel that the Goldwater/Reagan revolutions have fizzled out. They want a legitimate third way. They want a banner to rally behind that sheds off the constraints of today’s GOP — a party left in philosophical tatters after eight years of “compassionate” government growth, adventurous militarism, moral hypocrisy, and skyrocketing deficits — all endorsed by Bush (and now gleefully exploded into the stratosphere by Obama).
A bleak post about Tuesday, that most persistent and terrible of all days:
So, Tuesday, we meet again. Tuesday and I have met often and no good has ever come of it.
I am beyond Tuesday’s power, for I haven’t had steady work since last March, when I finally left minimum wage office jobs for the paradise that is TEFL (Teaching English to Johnny Foreigner). The paradise consists largely of being fired, getting a new job, then finding there’s almost no work so one may as well be unemployed; then, inevitably, borrowing yet more money from friends and relatives, and finally dying in a snow drift in the north of Germany; and then being eaten by wolves and crows. [Read more →]
