The Ark and The Dove

Change, but Let's Not Go Crazy with it...

I'm totally pumped about McCain's choice of Vice-President, Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin.

My favorite part of the whole thing is watching the Democratics stammer and squirm over it. Take this quote from Breitbart.com (via Drudge):

"Governor Palin shares John McCain's commitment to overturning Roe v. Wade, the agenda of Big Oil and continuing George Bush's failed economic policies. That's not the change we need, it's just more of the same," [Obama spokesman Bill Burton] said.

Uhm...how is changing the law really "just more of the same?" Isn't that, by definition, different from what we already have? I don't get it. And wasn't her claim to fame that she actually took Big Oil to task? Is it just because she doesn't think that we need to pretend like oil doesn't exist that they don't like her?

And, of course, the Obamaniacs are going nuts over the fact that she is younger and even more outside of the Beltway than Obama. Apparently, inexperience is only good for Democrats, not Republicans.

Then there is little gem from the article: she is "a telegenic conservative." Shocking!

Textbook Conversion

Toledo Blade via Drudge

Apparently, the author of tawdry novels Joe Eszterhas not only claims to have had a profound (dare I say miraculous) conversion experience; he claims the Eucharist called him.

When Mr. Eszterhas visited a nondenominational megachurch, he heard a sensational sermon. But he felt empty afterward, missing Holy Communion and the Catholic liturgy.

"It may have been a church full of pedophiles and criminals covering up other criminals' sins … it may have been a church riddled with hypocrisy, deceit, and corruption … but our megachurch experience taught us that we were captive Catholics," he wrote. Mr. Eszterhas told The Blade that despite his mixed feelings over the church and the abuse scandal, the power of the Mass trumps his doubts and misgivings. "The Eucharist and the presence of the body and blood of Christ is, in my mind, an overwhelming experience for me. I find that Communion for me is empowering. It's almost a feeling of a kind of high."

The article describes him as being "nonconformist" because he wears jeans and a t-shirt to Mass, won't give money to the Church out of frustration over the pedophile scandal, and thinks that priests' homilies are, by and large, boring and thoughtless.
That all sounds pretty conformist to me.
If anything, I would say his greatest nonconformity is a love and understanding of the Eucharist. I just hope he can stick with it when the "high" is gone (hopefully, someone will give him a copy of Mother Theresa's letters to read by then).

Drawing Crosses

Factcheck.org did some research into the story that McCain might have plagiarized his story about the guard from a story called "The Gulag Archipelago" by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. Quite interestingly, Factcheck discovered that the cross-in-the-dirt incident did not appear in the text, but was a personal anecdote by Solzhenitsyn that was repeated through other various sources. The site's final assessment is that there is no way to prove that McCain stole the anecdote or that the incident happened, so it entirely depends on whether or not you believe McCain. Ironically, however, people who remembered the incident from the book seem to be the ones with bad memory...

Because Making a Living in the Media isn't Absurd

I just checked out the trailer for Bill Maher's upcoming nonsense: Religulous.
He's trying to do a funny...but yet also somehow serious...lampoon of religion as a whole by interviewing strange and silly people, and then reaching the conclusion that anything supernatural must be wrong...period.
It's one of those problematic pieces, because I probably agree with his skepticism regarding religious fanaticism (and he makes sure to show lots of clips of religious fanaticism). I obviously don't agree with his overall assessment of religion, though. You don't, for instance, see him sitting down to have a sincere conversation with someone who actually knows what they are talking about...unless that person is providing a skeptical view of religion.
It also seems oddly intolerant for someone who is professing to be a liberal. You would think an open-minded, liberal person would be more accepting of other people's culture...and, if religion isn't real, isn't it at least a cultural phenomenon?
There's one point in the trailer where he tries to make an overweight southerner look like a raging buffoon for saying, "You start disputin' my god, and we got a problem." I don't think this is a reaction that would be exclusive to religion. Maher is going out egging people on, looking for a fight, and mocking people's way of life. If he showed up at someone's house and started ridiculing the furniture, or the food, or the clothes, he could get the same reaction.

Lie to Me

The Huffington Post ran a piece detailing how the story about Cindy McCain adopting a baby at the personal request of Mother Theresa appears to have been fabricated during later interviews. That is, Mrs. McCain at first said she was asked to adopt the baby by nuns, later said it was by Mother Theresa herself, and now appears to have backtracked to saying it was just by nuns.
It is true that she adopted the baby from Sisters of the Poor, but the Huffington Post is concerned about what the embellishment says about the McCains' characters.
Add to that accusations that Senator McCain might have lifted his touching story about the cross in the dirt from an author describing gulags, and you start to get a view of the McCains telling campfire stories to the nation.
The Democrats, of course, see this as a potential death blow to the McCain campaign...despite the fact that Obama has just signed on one of Washington's most famous plagiarists as his Vice President according to The Washington Post.

Honesty is, of course, a good thing, but at the risk of sounding like a mindless zombie or an evil Republican, is this kind of lying really serious enough to change my vote? (Reading the comments section on the Huffington Post gives one the sense that its readers really do think that Republicans are inherently dishonest, vile, liars...as opposed to straight talking, forthcoming, and honest Democrats like Bill and Hilary).

As I've said before, I pretty much assume any politician is lying to me at this point. All I'm looking for is the liar who at least tells me what I want to hear.

Even if Obama is the more sincere and honest candidate (and even if he can remember where all of his money goes), the fact of the matter is that I won't be voting on him because he doesn't agree with what I believe in. You can be a very honest person (which I'm not sure Obama is), but I'm still not going to vote for you if you are recommending that we take the country in a direction I don't want to go in.

I didn't stop celebrating Christmas when I found out that my vision of Santa Claus was generated by an advertising campaign. I'm not going to start voting Democrat because of exaggeration by a political campaign. I might, however, be persuaded to vote for Obama if he turned around and said he suddenly understood the Pro-Life position, would do his best to eliminate abortion entirely from the nation, and would make the practice illegal.

Of course, then he'd be a liar.

Should I Level up my Paladin, or my Webkinz...

My very generous niece decided to by me a Webkinz.
A leonine Webkinz in particular. Charles Williams would be quite impressed.
For those of you unfamiliar with Webkinz World, it is a highly lucrative marketing phenomenon marrying the dynamics of Beanie Babies, Facebook, and the World of Warcraft. A parent buys his or her kid a scraggly-looking plush toy, probably because there are signs in every gift shop, media outlet, and little girl's clothing store in the country announcing that they've just gotten a limited amount of new Webkinz in...and, of course, if it's new and scarce, you have to buy one. They might be worth money some day, after all.
But the fun doesn't stop at the initial acquisition. Oh, no. The Webkinz comes with a secret code that lets you access the Webkinz World site, where a little virtual version of the Webkinz appears on the screen. That's when Sims-itis kicks in. Your Webkiz exists in a virtual world and has various needs that must be met...by buying it stuff with virtual money. There are plenty of ways to acquire virtual money. You might get a virtual job, or play some virtual games. You can start a foster care racket by buying new Webkinz just so you can get their initial sum of money and welcome presents. And there are plenty of real world Webkinz accessories, each of which is merely a real world cipher for the online reality that its accompanying secret code unlocks. Indeed, it's rather like Plato's cave. These real world toys are merely the shadows of more perfect versions of themselves that exist in the ethereal cyberspace.
But what's particularly remarkable about Webkinz World is how much I'm learning.
Or rather, re-learning.
I'm quite serious, actually. See, one of the fastest ways to accrue Webkinz virtual capital is to answer questions in Mr. Quizzy's Corner.
Ahem.
Anyway, the questions are all geared towards elementary school students, which means that they are all the basic, important things that I've forgotten while learning about 17th Century socio-political effects on literary aesthetics. Remember the difference between igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks?
Me neither.
Mr. Quizzy reminded me. I only stopped by so I could buy myself...er...my Webkinz...a cool air hockey table, and totally had my memory banks jostled back to fifth grade science class.
Now, if these Webkinz people are smart, they'll develop some kind of twisted, ironic version of Webkinz for an older group and upgrade Mr. Quizzy with Baron's and Kaplan's SAT and GRE questions.
I hated taking those sample tests and vocabulary drills...but, heck, if I could have powered up an elven thief every time I answered a question in a sample test, I'd probably have graduated from Harvard...and have one kick-butt rate to detect traps by now.

I Miss the CSC...

Apparently, the Archdiocese of Harrisburg must not allow its priests to say a Mass that is under an hour.

It's quite a long haul, actually.

I've seen little ones totally lose it around 55 minutes.

I know people complain when parishioners cut out before the final blessing, but I also think that a priest essentially invites them to do so after the forty-five minute mark. Of course, where I've been going to Mass, we haven't even gotten to the consecration of the Bread and Wine by then.

There must be some kind of law of conservation of Mass time that is forcing me to make up for all of the fifteen minute Masses at UMD.

What about Soulmates?

Random thought of the day:
I've often heard fellow pro-lifers like to say things "There would be a cure for cancer, but we aborted the person who would have discovered it."

I understand the sentiment of the argument, but I don't know that's quite how these things work. I'm not sure that scientific progress depends exclusively on some kind of vocation-driven providence. That is, I don't think God sits around hiding cures for horrible diseases from people who are searching for them simply because someone else was murdered.

On the other hand, if you are a particularly romantic person and believe that there really is someone special for you out there, that relationship seems far more vulnerable to something like death.

What if some of these lonely souls and broken marriages are due to the fact that the personalities that would have best complemented a spouse were lost to death? Whether or not abortion has deprived the world of medical knowledge, abortion has surely deprived women of their future husbands and husbands of their wives.

McCain: The Pro-choice President

At least, that's what CNN.com was reporting according to this screen capture I took.

 

Yoda Goes Roman Catholic

Okay, not really...
But Pewsitter.com linked to this article on Marian apparitions that has to contain some of the most excessive use of the rhetorical figure of hyperbaton (Yoda-speak) outside of the Clone Wars.