That’s All, Folks

Well, gang, it’s been fun. However, it appears that I have inadvertently caused a rift between a pal o’ mine and a member of his family by reposting some of the former’s Email content. Who knew?

It’s never been my intention to cause personality issues here, which is why I’ve remained anonymous. But since it seems to have happened anyway, I’m going to stop posting on this page. I truly am sorry for having been the indirect cause of some kind of family trauma.

But don’t worry, my friends: I’ll be back, somewhere, fighting the good fight. (Unfortunate that some people take everything personally, the big babies.)  I’ll stick to my own material in the future.

Thanks for reading.

R.K.

Who’s Your Friend When Things Get Rough?

I won’t be the first to suggest that Pufnstuf seems to have been what Sid and Marty Krofft were doing when they created various children’s shows in the late ’60s and ’70s. However, having heard the theme song recently of H.R. Pufnstuf, I find that this stuff was more ill from a Freudian perspective than I remembered.

Dr. Freud, Call Your Office.

An evil witch trying to steal a boy’s magic flute. A witch whose last name (well, the tail end of her name) is “Poo.”

Pufnstuf himself looked like a stoner of some sort, those weird bags under his eyes and all, kind of like the big red nose clowns adopted because dipsomania is funny!

The Kroffts also gave us Lidsville, the land of living hats (nothin’ weird there!). Back in the day, kiddies, a “lid” referred to an ounce of marijuana.

Who let these guys near children?

Weird Comments

I’ve been getting messages from some guys who have apparently mistaken me for a friend of mine; they’ve been taking issue with my stance on the court’s decision on gay marriage, and while I appreciate their concerns, I think they’ve got the wrong end of the stick here.

The point is that the Constitution only does provide what our idiot President once called “negative” rights, promises that the government will not interfere with us, which is what makes our Constitution unique and enduring. When you start promising “positive” rights, you open the door to an endless demands for all sorts of things.

If the U.S. government or the states moved in to try to stop religious services from marrying two guys or two gals or whatever, they might have an argument (but then again, see what Utah had to go to to achieve statehood). As it is, the Constitution does not deal with issues of marriage, so by the rule of the Tenth Amendment it must leave that up to the states. Antimiscegenation laws opened the door for the courts to apply the Fourteenth Amendment to the topic of marriage, but the decision in Loving v. Virginia was only applicable to race. That decision is not applicable here. Another court may do the same for same-sex marriage, but that’s a different argument.

Again, though, if marriage is defined as being any two people who want to be married, what’s to stop it from being any three, or four, or however many want to be married? No one has an answer for that beyond, well, it just won’t be. Uh-huh.

(P.S.: I’ll tell M. you said hello.)

Courting Disaster

Just a couple of crucial points here to make about this dopey ruling on Proposition 8 in California:

1. When we have become a nation in which every voter initiative can be overturned by judicial fiat, there is nothing left for people but revolt. Issue supporters on all sides like to go judge-shopping to find a judge sympathetic to their cause, and then strike. So no matter what the majority wants, some activist judge can be found to overturn it. (Guess which side of the political spectrum has the most activist judges.) How do you think this makes voters feel about issues they care about, especially at times like this when the government at all levels is at war with its own citizenry (cf. Arizona, the Ground Zero mosque, Obamacare, etc).

The thumb on the scale is not visible, but you can see by the results that it's there.

2. I hope that gay marriage enthusiasts are cool with polygamy, because as Mark Steyn points out, there is no argument in favor of same-sex marriage than cannot and will not be used to promote polygamy. This from last year:

Five years ago, proponents of same-sex marriage went into full you-cannot-be-serious eye-rolling mode when naysayers warned that polygamy would be next. As I wrote in that Western Standard piece:

“Gay marriage, they assure us, is the merest amendment to traditional marriage, and once we’ve done that we’ll pull up the drawbridge.”

 Claire L’Heureux-Dubé, the former Supreme Court justice, remains confident the drawbridge is firmly up. “Marriage is a union of two people, period,” she said in Quebec the other day. But it used to be a union of one man and one woman, period. And, if that period got kicked down the page to accommodate a comma and a subordinate clause, why shouldn’t it get kicked again? If the sex of the participants is no longer relevant, why should the number be?

3. A court that is powerful enough to give you whatever you want is powerful enough to take away whatever it wants. Someone who will not see the problem with this has a grasp of history that makes a gnat’s look comprehensive.

The Principles of a Free and Independent Citizenry Fought For

Buried in the news yesterday was the triumphant slap in the face delivered to the jerks in Washington by the free citizens of Missouri, and God bless them for it.

Here’s another take:

More than 7 voters in 10 on Tuesday supported Proposition C, a ballot measure designed to allow state residents to ignore the federal law’s mandate on individuals to either buy health insurance or become insured with government help. With nearly 1 million voters participating, typically light turnout for a primary election day, 29 percent opposed the measure.

Although the ballot measure focused on just one element of the health reform law – the individual mandate – the vote was to some degree a test of public opinion of the law itself. It comes as other states are mounting legal challenges to the law and as both Democrats and Republicans are focusing on health care as a core issue for congressional elections this fall.

Normally I’m too full of the milk of human kindness to encourage slogans like “It’s the Socialism, Stupid,” but I begin to think it’s the only way to get this message across to these lunkheads. Hawkins may be right; Socialism makes you stupid. And why wouldn’t it? Socialism means never having to say “I can do it!” It means always saying “We’ll do it!”—and by “we” they mean “you.”

So thanks, Missouri, and I’m proud to hoist your flag today. Love the bears, by the way.

Liberals Hate You

It doesn’t take a lot of digging to find contempt for Western values (especially American) at the heart of liberalism. Now that they’ve had the driver’s seat for a couple of years, and owned academia since before Buckley wrote his famous exposé, the contempt for all of us is coming to the surface. It’s ugly.

Two interesting cases from San Francisco, a city that was once thought of as being as straight-laced as Boston–if you can believe that was once straight-laced too. The first (via Taranto’s “Best of the Web” yesterday) points out that San Francisco is so determined to protect handouts to favored minorities (like women, who make up more than 50 percent of the population) that they’ve essentially sued themselves for discrimination:  

The state Supreme Court rejected San Francisco’s constitutional challenge to California’s ban on race-conscious affirmative action programs Monday, saying the government is not required to allow racial preferences.

 

Well, I’ll let Taranto take it:

The decision quotes from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ legislative findings in 2003, when it enacted the most recent ordinance (citation omitted):

The Board found that “the race- and gender-conscious remedial programs authorized by [the . . .] Ordinance continue to be necessary to remedy discrimination against minority- and women-owned businesses in City prime contracting and subcontracting.” The Board also found “that the City . . . is actively discriminating against women and minority groups in its contracting, and is passively participating in discrimination in the private sector.”You read that right. San Francisco officials claim that they have to discriminate against whites and men because they discriminate against minorities and women!

Why in the world don’t they just stop discriminating?

The next bit is pretty well-known–San Francisco suing because it can’t stand democracy in action when the stoopid people won’t vote the right way:

SAN FRANCISCO – A federal judge in San Francisco will disclose his decision today on whether California’s same-sex marriage ban violates the constitutional rights of gays and lesbians.

U.S. District Court Chief Judge Vaughn Walker is ruling in a lawsuit brought by two same-sex couples seeking to overturn Proposition 8, which outlaws gay marriage.

Liberals love America only when it does as it’s told.

People like to accuse the Church of that kind of behavior, and I won’t deny that there are plenty of grouchy Catholics in the laity and the clergy who hate the sin and aren’t too thrilled with the sinner, either. But two things to bear in mind:

1. The Church’s love for all mankind in institutional, not incidental, and hatred of others is in violation of its most fundamental principles; and

2. The Church can claim a much higher authority for its actions than the City of San Friggin’ Cisco can.

So remember, kiddies: Liberals hate you, and they don’t much care if you know it anymore.

The Ballad of Henry and William and James

[With no particular apologies to Warren Zevon, although I have ripped off his "Frank and Jesse James" rather than Billy Gashade's "Ballad of Jesse James," which, in my literary appraisal, sucks stones.]

In a New York City home

Back when all men were men
Two boys learned to talk and write
And be handy with a pen
The old man was a thinker
Swedenborgian to his eyes
It was there in New York County
That Hank and Billy first philosophized  

Chorus
Keep on writing, writing, writing
Hank and Billy James
Keep on writing, writing, writing
Until you make your names
Keep on writing, writing, writing
Till you win immortal fame
Keep on writing, writing, writing
Hank and… Billy James

Bill went to Psychology
To London Henry flew
Billy learned Philosophy
Hank, What Maisie Knew
Varieties of Religion
Embraced young Billy’s soul
While Henry took a mighty squat
On The Golden Bowl

Chorus; memorize for midterm

Charlie Peirce the pragmatist
Who wanted Billy dead
Took the life of Bill the writer
Quincunxed him on the head
No one know just where they came
To be misunderstood
But the tired undergraduates know
That Hank and Billy do the best they could

Chorus; repeat until you get your B.A.

Doofus Teens and Invisible Men

A couple of stories of the day caught the ol’ SoberHorseThief eye:

1. From USA Today:

Nearly nine in 10 teenage drivers have engaged in distracted-driving behaviors such as texting or talking on a cellphone although most of them know that their actions increase their risk of crashing, a new survey finds.

Which means teen #10 lied.

The online survey of 1,999 teens ages 16-19, conducted in May and made public today, found that 84% were aware that distracted-driving behaviors increase their crash risk; yet 86% have engaged in those behaviors, including texting and talking on cellphones, eating, adjusting radios, driving with four or more passengers and applying makeup.

And they’re morons behind the wheel anyway. This morning a kid was next to me in a lane that was ending, or she was about a half a car behind–right in my blind spot. Now, a sane human being would have put on the brake and eased gently into the vast amount of space behind me. But this was no sane human being—this was a teen. (Maybe she was a little older, but obviously hadn’t matured yet.) No, she remained in the same lane AT THE SAME SPEED. If I had not caught sight of her at the last second, with twenty feet to go at the merge, and scooted left (fortunately there was room–barely–in front of a truck) she would have just merged right into my car. I looked over to give her the classic WTF face, and she just glanced back, unperturbed. Far as I could tell she didn’t even have the excuse of phoning or texting. Bill Cosby was right about children being brain-damaged; it just lasts longer than he thought.

2. Typical coverage of the hate-crime beatings on the ancestral homeland of Staten Island, by NY1 News:

Police say a 17-year-old Mexican boy was attacked early Saturday morning on Staten Island in what authorities are calling the 10th bias case in the borough.

The teen was returning from work at a Manhattan restaurant around 2:30 a.m. when he was jumped by two teenagers near a bus stop on Castleton Avenue and Simonson Place in Port Richmond.

According to police, the teens shouted anti-Mexican statements as they hit him. The victim was also allegedly robbed of $10.

Who were these attackers? Why would they do such a heinous crime? Are they skinheads? Neonazis? White supremacists? What’s motivating this anti-Mexican hatred? Look, I’m not trying to blame the victim; I just would like the reporters to, you know, report. But no, this is the hatred that dares not speak its name. Rather like the vicious attacks in Sydney by the Men of No Appearance that Tim Blair documented.

You have to go to the Wall Street Journal to find out what the thugs were like:

Two of the men were African American and one was Hispanic, he said. The victim told police that the Hispanic man asked him an innocuous question before the African-American men jumped him while all three made anti-Mexican statements, officials said.

And even then there’s no thoughts on the motives, none at all. A Hispanic helps attack a Mexican and the newspaper reporter could not be bothered to find that interesting enough to ask why.

Could it have something to do with…oh, I don’t know…maybe…ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION? Even if it doesn’t, wouldn’t it be WORTH ASKING THE DAMN QUESTION?

Terry Troia, the executive director of Project Hospitality, a group that serves poor people and immigrants on Staten Island, said it is troubling that the latest attack occurred amid the increased police presence and underscores the “unconscionable” burden facing Latinos in Port Richmond.

My dictionary says that Latinos would include Hispanics, but I get the feeling this clown is only interested in the ones that aren’t even supposed to be here. But I don’t know, because nobody in the news business thinks it’s worth while trying to find out. Throughout these attacks it seems the moment the media heard that the punks committing the crimes were not white, they lost interest in that half of the story. Is this what the teach now in J-school? If so, there are a bunch of student loans begging to be defaulted on.

Newspapers and TV news shows are dying in part because we are sick of being fed hype and nonsense, but also because we are tired of them selectively dribbling out what they think we ought to know, as if we’re small children who have to be kept in the dark about grown-up things. The sooner these “news” outlets start failing in massive numbers, the sooner we’ll start getting some real journalism again.

Neither Free nor Thought

When I was younger (okay, that covers everything up until this second, but you know what I mean) I was perplexed by G.K. Chesterton’s dictum that “Freethinkers are occasionally thoughtful, though never free.” It always seemed to be that someone who believed in nothing would have more options than someone who believed in something, just as a numbers game, since the moment you plant your flag on a piece of territory you are obliged to stand by to defend it and ignore every other place.

I believe I was mistaken. As Chesterton went on to say, freethinkers “seem always to be tied to the treadmill of the materialist and monist cosmos….The freethinker is not free to question monism. He is forbidden…to believe in a miracle.”

I was thinking about this a bit the other day when an old friend posted a link to some anti-Bible tract, having a lovely time pointing out the cruelty of God to His people in the text. Well, I guess all those years of Catholic school did nothing to teach him about the Church’s understanding of the Old Testament. Not that I don’t understand him, because believe me, I do, and if you just go by the text there doesn’t seem to be a dime’s worth a difference between God’s chosen folks and the pagans He helps smite. But that’s an understanding, visceral as it is, more worthy of a kindergartener than a grown man.

Just another example of the old saw that when you want to beat a dog, any stick will do.

Freethinking is justified in loving tones by those who like to quote Tolstoy‘s War and Peace: “Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking; where it is absent, discussion is apt to become worse than useless.” The atheist guy at About.com quotes it, and I’m sure he knows that Tolstoy was a Christian, but I suppose you could call him a Christian who followed little dogma, or at least, little dogma that he had himself not devised.

Well, I can’t find the quote anyway, or anything like it, in the book, although who knows what translation the About guy used–if he used one at all and didn’t get it from some other jamoke’s Web site. (Is there a bigger topic of misinformation on the Web than wrongly attributed quotations?) As for the quote itself–free of prejudice? Good luck with that, Scooter. The rest of the criteria hinge on that condition, and I say atheists are no better at it than the rest of us.

The Christian faces hard truth, because it forces him to behave in ways that he would not like to, to deny himself and sacrifice for others. The atheist’s courage relies in annoying people and then going to do whatever the hell he wants. His truth is nothing but justification for his pride and his actions.

The so-called freethinker is only free in the way a moth is–flitting, attracted to fires, short-lived. The freethinker and his pals are much bigger conformists than Christians, whose tent holds an awful lot of different types. The freethinker is a rebel the way popular high school kids are rebels, all dressing and acting and thinking the same in a small proscribed area of permitted behavior.

The Christian knows all too well the limitations of Man; the freethinker does not admit them, and so falls into the trap. If the latter would be free, he had better set down his flag somewhere to anchor himself.

Losers All Around

I swear I am trying to avoid news about the New York Mets. Really, I am, and after another loss last night to a lousy team, they have proven to be once again the world’s most disappointing franchise and unworthy of my love. Then there’s this:

The owners of the New York Mets should be responsible for reimbursing more than $16 million in pension benefits invested on behalf of their workers in Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, according to a lawsuit filed by the widow of an employee.

Elyse S. Goldweber, the beneficiary of her late husband’s 401(k) plan, filed suit yesterday against Sterling Equities Inc., which owns the Major League Baseball team, in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan. The lawsuit, which also named Mets Chief Executive Officer Fred Wilpon, said most of the couple’s $280,420 retirement fund was “wiped out.”

Oh, goody. Because the ownership of the Mets has proven to be too distracted to bother picking up another pitcher or firing manager Grady, we have to be another innocent casualty of Madoff’s evil schemes and the greedheads who fell for it.

Not Jerry. But close.

Surely the Mets are second only to General Motors as Chrysler as valuable American properties that have been managed by nincompoops. Oh, and on the topic of those other companies, there was this:

President Barack Obama said today the auto industry was seeing “real progress” as he continued to dwell on his decision to save General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group LLC.

The president taped his weekly address at GM’s Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly plant on Friday, where he made one of two stops at U.S. auto plants. He also visited Chrysler’s Jefferson North plant.

He said the plant might not be in operation if he had listened to opponents.

“Of course, if some folks had their way, none of this would be happening at all. This plant might not exist. There were leaders of the ‘just say no’ crowd in Washington who argued that standing by the auto industry would guarantee failure,” Obama said. “They said we should just walk away and let these jobs go. Today, the men and women in this plant are proving these cynics wrong.”

Well, President Asshat, because this is all about YOU again, just like every other goddamn thing you talk about, shall we look at YOUR math for a moment?

Money spent to salvage Detroit auto industry to prevent it from a genuine bankruptcy restructuring that would have made it competitive worldwide, in order to pay back lobbyists and UAW: $86 billion

Chrysler employees total: 50,000

GM employees total: 217,000

Per job spent: $322,097.38

And when I need a new car I am not buying: Chrysler or GM, because I’ve no interest in supporting unsustainable companies. Screw ‘em if they can’t figure out how to make money without sucking off the government teat.

And don’t tell me Obama will bail out the Mets either. Why, so they can finish paying off “Eat Mo” Vaughn or otherwise sweep their other dumb decisions under the rug on the expense of the people’s wallet?