Category Archives: culture & value

Tell me this is just GOP fundraising

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Please remember the usual caveats that, if you think something I say is boneheaded, and your looking forward to voting for her, you’re still welcom to visit my church and I won’t bite or anything….

Becaue it can’t be true, can it?

Three things you can take to the bank (or your bookie) next year: the Arizona Cardinals won’t be playing in the Superbowl, Mardi Gras will be on a Tuesday, and Hillary Rodham Clinton will become the Democrat’s presidential nominee (read the rest).

Oh well. I guess it guarrantees more to talk about in the next year.

pop-music-18-meme

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I still need to do this one, but an easier meme has been sent to me. I was a metal head too, but I’m wondering if I was true enough. I love nostalgic 80s music now. And a lot of rock/metal makes me cringe. (Iron Maiden still makes me proud, but Quiet Riot? What was I thinking?)

So here’s the meme:

1. Go to http://www.popculturemadness.com/
2. Pick the year you turned 18 (left column)
3. Get yourself nostalgic over the song’s of the year
4. Write something about how the songs affected you
5. Pass it on to 5 more friends

I graduated from high school at the age of 17, so the songs of my eighteenth year are all associated in my mind with my first year of college.

This first one is kind of cheating since I knew nothing about the song or group until the movie came out. I watched it over 15 times. No. I am not exaggerating. I’m probably understating how many times. I refuse to watch the movie now because, I think, if I discover it was stupid, it will send me into an identity crisis.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/Y_9sB92dJzM" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

This was a ubiquitous song on campus. I remember it playing at the Brookside (That was the first year it was renamed Lambein after a doner, but the denizens were fiercely resisting) on a lazy indian summer afternoon, while I waited for a friend I had just met to come down and take a walk or something. The song never made sense, though compared to the video (which I just saw for the first time ever–the Lincoln Memorial?), it is up there with the theory of relativity. Stll, for better or worse, it captures the mid-80s for me.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/IxoqzhgKReY" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

I remember being amazed Madonna could do a video where she appeared normal. I hate her but she was and is a genius of pop music. And this one was atmospheric. I never saw the movie and never will. But I still liked this video.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/fvRttd5ESx8" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Great band. Great album (the better songs weren’t the ones that got radio play). Liked the Christian theme. Saw them in concert but was totally distracted and don’t remember much.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/TU7bp8aj99E" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

This one makes the Starship song look like a work of genius. It kind of incarnates everything bad and pretentious about the eighties and makes you want to dance to it. It still moves me (just not in public).

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/jjBXK4CTtvM" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Coming back up from dive we just took. Peter Gabriel, “So” came out. I liked all the songs, but this was the first one to be released, I think.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/VArQABogDL4" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Finally, going back to not great quality, something about the beginning lyrics really captured my own sense of melodrama and angst (which plagued my first year of college). I have no idea what the song is actually about.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/H_i_C7r6uqE" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Four others: Jennifer, Paul, Wayne, Chris, and Jeff.

Since I never say anything controversial here…

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…well, first the usual caveats.  You don’t have to agree with me.  I don’t necesarily preach this from the pulpit.  I want to be friends with everyone and lead Bible studies and teach outside of the tiny group of right-wing nuts who are just like me.  This is just an opinion, somewhat tentative and yet somewhat strong….

Don’t hurt me.

Please.

But I really think illegal immigration is a good thing.

First  of all, we have a bunch of jobs that satisfied or lazy Americans won’t do for the market price.  Thank God for migrant farm workers.  They make money and we get to eat.

Oh, they don’t make enough.  No they don’t.  But putting them on a welfare reservation isn’t going to help.  And preventing them from coming over here is not going to put food in their mouths.

Also, thanks to illegal immigration, we might become a genuinely bilingual country.  That has got to mean our children are going to develop about ten more IQ points than otherwise.  Look, you’ve heard the joke:

What to you call someone who speaks two languages?  Bilingual.

What to you call someone who speaks three languages?  Trilingual.

What about someone who speaks one language? Monolingual.

Nope.  You call him an American.

Well, that might finally cease to be the case.  I think there are great things about American exceptionalism, but in this case it would be better if we were more like Europeans and virtually everyone else in the world.

Also, people are the source of all wealth.  Declining population is a recipe for economic disaster.  Illegal immigration isn’t the best solution to what abortion-on-demand has left us with, but it still helps.  We need to keep growing.

People talk about immigration laws as if they were holy and sancrosanct.  OK, we should all obey our authorities.  But does that mean we can’t point to lawbreaking as a sign that a law is stupid?  Do we really condemn the people who didn’t abide by prohibition as much as we condemn people who break laws against stealing, counterfeiting, or violating other government monopolies?

What about fleeing from communist countries.  I remember some movie about how people made a balloon to escape from East Germany?  This was utterly illegal.  But they did it because they wanted economic freedom and prosperity.  Americans typically called these people heroes?  So why are immigrants to our country not heroes?  They are doing exactly the same thing.

And in what sense is a Mexican looking for a better life bound by the laws of the US?  The whole situation looks gray to me.

So what does the Bible say?  I’m not going to insult anyone’s intelligence by pointing out all the many times we are commanded to welcome immigrants.  I’ll just take this one: ““If your brother becomes poor and cannot maintain himself with you, you shall support him as though he were a stranger and a sojourner, and he shall live with you” (Leviticus 25.35).  So there you go.  When your own countrymen are destitute you are to treat him as well as you would a foreigner who is destitute.  The passage assume that the Israelites are going to actually support the immigrants.

Oh, but those weren’t illegal immigrants.

Right, the Bible would consider laws against immgration to be illegal.

Oh, but they are so rude and obnoxious. Oh puh-leeze.  Like we don’t see that all the time among native-borns.  Crime increases because we don’t deal with it like we should.  We won’t punish criminals so we invent controlled-substance laws to do away with the alleged cause of criminal behavior.  The police can’t enforce noise ordinances and public lewdness statutes so we decide we need a massive police state and reams of barbed wire so you don’t have to be upset by rude behavior.  Truly, conservatives are always two steps behind liberals.  If you don’t like barbaric behavior than find ways to deal with it for both natives and aliens.  Or, perhaps, consider becoming tolerant of other people.

What about all our welfare benefits?  I’d be happy if immigrants were not granted access to those.  I’d be even happier if natives were also not granted access to those.  But if illegal immigration means government services are going to become impossible sooner than otherwise, that would be a real bonus, as far as I’m concerned.

The bottom line is that people should be free to seek their fortunes without a police state getting in the way.  They are not enemies for wanting to work here.  And if they want welfare benefits, well, we are the ones who were stupid enough to offer them.

This doesn’t mean, by the way, I think border guards should be consigned to torture for doing their jobs so Bush can look good to “liberals.”

That’s how I feel about all this, for what it is worth.

Just have to hurt people for no reason at all….

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Recent news:

“I just curiously asked him, ‘Where are you getting the Internet connection?’, you know,” Sparta Police Chief Andrew Milanowski said. “And he said, ‘From the café.'”

Milanowski ruled out Peterson as a possible stalker of the attractive local hairdresser, but still felt that a law might have been broken.

“We came back and we looked up the laws and we figured if we found one and thought, ‘Well, let’s run it by the prosecutor’s office and see what they want to do,'” Milanowski said.

A few weeks later Peterson said he received a letter from the Kent County prosecutor’s office saying that he faced a felony charge of fraudulent access to computer networks and that a request had been made for an arrest warrant.

The law, introduced in 1979 to protect Internet and private-network users from hackers, and amended in 2000 to include wireless systems, makes piggybacking off of Wi-Fi networks, even those without a password, illegal.

“It wasn’t anything we were looking for, and it wasn’t anything that we frankly particularly wanted to get involved in, but it basically fell in our lap and it was a little hard to just look the other way when somebody handed it to us,” said Lynn Hopkins, assistant prosecuting attorney for Kent County.

Albert Jay Nock’s “Anarchist’s Progress”:

Once, I remember, I ran across the case of a boy who had been sentenced to prison, a poor, scared little brat, who had intended something no worse than mischief, and it turned out to be a crime. The judge said he disliked to sentence the lad; it seemed the wrong thing to do; but the law left him no option. I was struck by this. The judge, then, was doing something as an official that he would not dream of doing as a man; and he could do it without any sense of responsibility, or discomfort, simply because he was acting as an official and not as a man. On this principle of action, it seemed to me that one could commit almost any kind of crime without getting into trouble with one’s conscience.

Previews that intrigue me

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I probably won’t see these until they come out on DVD, but they look interesting. (Note: I got these from apple trailers. The aspect ratio will be off unless you have a pretty wide screen–and it may still not be right even then. Go to the Apple trailers page to see a better picture.)

I hope this movie succeeds in dealing with a distinctively modern situation.

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This one is probably going to be unredeemable. I’ll keep my eyes on the reviews. However, I have to say that the trailer is poignant and, if I thought it was representative, I would see it:

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I tried to use the smallest preview to make this fit better. It looks like it could be amazing. I hope they don’t blow it for political reasons.

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This looks hysterical but the R rating probably represents enough gratuitous stuff that I won’t see it. (I also notice that the anarchy code fixes a different aspect ratio and there’s nothing I can do about it.)

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Ok, the normal trailer is missing so here’s a hi-def view. Let’s see if it works. If this proves suitable I’m thinking about taking Evangeline to it as a special father-daughter treat. We’ll see… May not be age appropriate; depends on the amount of consumer propaganda and the boy-girl stuff which is obviously a disney marketing ploy.

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Racism protected, preserved, and perpetuated, in the PCA

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I took down a post yesterday that cited publicly broadcast material from a PCA church. There are some ironies involved given recent events that I won’t go into.

I took it down because some thought there had to be some sort of private conference. Frankly, I’m all for giving presbyteries a chance to suppress evil, but when stuff like this is broadcast, I think the situation becomes more comparable to this incident.

Someone with little to less than zero sympathy for my part in certain doctrinal debates mentioned that this might reflect “obscurantism” in the PCA. I know that I have undoubtedly been guilty of that, probably more often than I know. But he is utterly right. We are about to be a true sanhedrin, condemning the innocent while all sorts of foul evil takes place in the location where we meet.

Another bitter irony is that while real evil is done, others will condemn a man for having the “wrong” opinion about the rights and wrongs of the Civil War. It’s a stupid issue to get in the way of minstry, of course, but to see him slandered while the real stuff is ignored…

How can any soul not be outraged?

I have no idea if I will repost the material or not.

Not Harvard material

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This column about getting into (or not) Harvard, is exceptional.  It reminds me of this excellent video by Sir Ken, which I blogged about here.

Hat Tip: Chris

Somewhere maybe someone has perfectly formulated how it should all come together in wisdom.  But I haven’t found it yet.  It seems obvious to me that, while it takes effort to better oneself, that doesn’t mean it does any good to try to turn yourself (or your children) into someone else.  Yeah, they need to be encouraged to run, but in their own direction.