Eating Conservatives

FLB claims conservatives eat their young. I’m trying to think how that would work. We can’t use ketchup, because it’s red–duh!–and goodness knows there will be no French’s mustard employed. Perhaps it will just be A-1 steak sauce, in honour of our rightful place in the front of the line of the universe. And the preferred draft status.

All kidding aside. Or most kidding aside…
In the “Let’s Roger Roger” sweepstakes from Sarcastro’s that I’m stirring up again, I see that Terry has said this:

I regularly take fellow Republicans to task for what I believe to be straying from conservative principles.

I’ve seen this thinking for years among parties of the left-leaning ideologies. Words cannot describe how happy I am to see it cropping up on the Eastern side of the continuum as well.

Politics is not a religion. I don’t fear a theocracy, because the probability of any theocratic government in the U.S. is just about as high as the number of pounds I lose over Christmas. I do fear the elevation of party ideology to theosophic standard, though.

Politics is a zero-sum game by definition. One candidate will win, while the other loses. Governance, however, is to be a sum-all proposition. Everyone is to come away served by their involvement, whether by guns or by butter.

The minute anybody starts talking about a political party as though it were an unfailing power, you lose the sum-all proposition of governance. It becomes more about a punch-card binding, a stifling of free thought. Blind party loyalty is the death of reason.

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Who Says They Need Lance To Make It Interesting?

The Tour de France starts tomorrow. I had high hopes for Hincapie and Landis before, but now, with the Huge doping scandal breaking, things are really looking interesting for this July.

The only thing bad about being cycling enthusiasts is that is even more brie-eatingly lame than futbol, the Metric System of sports.

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Live Blogging A Dead Machine

You know what isn’t good? Staying up all night fretting over a computer problem you won’t be able to fix until the stores open.

On the plus side, MacAuthority are in my good graces once again. They guarantee all RAM they install for life. So I don’t have to pony up for the new DIMM. Which is a very good thing.

On the minus side, I have a “really bad Directory Problem” according to the Genius Bar. I’m running DiskWarrior as a Hail-Mary pass.

Keep your fingers crossed.

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Does Anybody Want A $2500 Paperweight?

You know it’s bad if I get this mad at my Mac. Poor Stitch is sick. He has Kernel Panic and increasingly rapid intervals. I suspect bad RAM, but I don’t even know if a bad RAM chip can cause KP.

It seems to happen most often when running Mac-Native software apps. (iTunes, Mail, Safari) I am beginning to suspect a bit of a hiccup in a foundational app like Quicktime.

But at the moment my powers of rational thought and logic (which one need for computer diagnostics) have flown out the window. I see a trip to the Genius Bar in my future.

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Watch Me Be Fantastic!

Jamey Tucker has a story today about a missions project involving the Christian band Jars of Clay. It sound like a very worthwhile missions project. Jamey closes the story with an observation about this being what a true Christian band would do.

Rick Warren, the author of A Purpose-Driven Life seems to have told every person in Christendom that he ‘reverse-tithes’, ie. give away 90% and keep 10%.

Other Christians I’ve met and whose blogs I’ve read often make no secret of their giving activities. They’ll let it drop casually in conversation that they’ve paid for the new plasma screens in the church or that their company donated foodstuffs to the homeless shelter. Or they’ll share deeply personal decisions to alter their lifestyles and give the proceeds to ‘the needy.’

It happens in the secular world all the time. Think celebrities who “donated their time” for high-press events in the wake of 9/11 and Katrina. With mainstream secular folk it’s a slightly different story, simply because these people have often made no public claim to the Christian or Jewish faiths, and as such can’t be expected to be governed by the same standard.

But in the Jewish and Christian worlds we have several examples about giving. In Judaism you were instructed to bring your offerings to the storehouse, and pool them with the offerings of others. Giving was NOT a personal act. The gifts to the needy were distributed from the communal store, effectively distancing the giver from the receiver. This was to benefit both. The Giving party comes to understand the concept of Mitzvah, or Goodness for Goodness’ sake, while the Receiving party has no sense of direct obligation to any human being, but only to God.

Of course, by the time Jesus the Radical showed up, the circumstances had changed. Wealthy believers would loudly announce their gifts as they entered the storehouse. It was roughly the equivalent of someone standing up in a church today and saying “Here I am putting $50K in the offering plate!” In Matthew 6:1-3, Jesus had this to say:

1 “Be careful that you don’t do your charitable giving before men, to be seen by them, or else you have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.

2 Therefore when you do merciful deeds, don’t sound a trumpet before yourself, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may get glory from men. Most certainly I tell you, they have received their reward.

3 But when you do merciful deeds, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand does,

Even in cases where He Himself performed miracles, he would ask the healed parties to not tell anyone. The good that we do isn’t supposed to reflect on us. It’s supposed to be a Mitzvah–good for the sake of good. Not the sake of good press.

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Blogs I Miss Part Two: Cobb Strikes Back

I confess something. I wrote that last post in part because I was requested to do so by a third party. “Write me a post, you’re the blogging gal! Write me a post tonight! We’re all in the mood for a quick read, and you’ve got us feeling alright!”

I knew as soon as I wrote it, I’d be leaving some people off. Not on purpose, but because I didn’t have any set definition for what constituted “gone” and “miss”. And I am really forgetful.

But there are others I miss, and so I’m going to list them now.

Sharon Cobb
Sharon confuses me. I thought she left blogging, but then I saw her comment from time to time. It kind of reminded me of the ghost of an old sea captain or something. Then she came back a week or so ago, and so I thought “hey! Look! She’s back!” But I guess she isn’t. I’m still confused. But I do miss reading her interesting take on things. Even though she’s such a liberal, and I’m such a conservative, it was always interesting to check in on things in her neighborhood. And always interesting to read a liberal who doesn’t sound like a Kosmonaut. When she and John H. were gone, I had a huge gaping hole in my liberal blog-read quotient.

Lacy @ Silverberry
Lacy is one of the first local bloggers I read. Like Pink Kitty, she’s busy with relocating her entire life, and I can understand her not being around. But I still miss having her to read.

TV on the Fritz
Some people think they’re too good for the blogosphere these days. What with their big media job and all. Sigh. I miss Fritzie.

I know I’m forgetting more people. But these are on the top of my head right now.

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Castor, Pollux, And Feline Little Britches

Feline Little Britches wrote me a poem. (I’ve decided that is her Native American Name.)

Well, I assume it was at least partly to me, if not wholly so.

Which leads me to trying to explain why I spent so much time over at Superman’s Fortress of Blogitude fighting over whether or not Terry and Roger can share custody of the Tennessee Republican Party.

Question one: Aren’t Sarcastro and I supposed to be libertarians? Why do we care about the Tennessee Republican Party? Let’s table that one for further discussion–it involves something about limited options and Tammany Hall. I think.

I was born in May. If I believed in Astrology–once I finished shooting myself for believing in Astrology– I would think “hey, maybe we’re on to something with this whole Sign thing” My sign is Gemini. The twins. Theoretically this means that I have two sides to my personality. While this is true, I think it is mere coincidence and not the fault of May 23rd itself.

Both twins are basically nice, genial fellows but Castor is infinitely more laidback and long-suffering. Castor is the one who says things like “I’m not going to allow this person to have mental and emotional power over me” and other such pop-psychisms. Castor is the one who comes up with good answers in Sunday Bible study and rescues stray dogs and donates money to needy people.

Pollux is the one who gets irritated very easily. Pollux is the twin who says things like “you are the prime evidence of the utter failure of our public school system” and enjoys watching Judge Judy scream at scared teenagers who sue their ex-boyfriends for unpaid cellphone bills. Pollux will point out that “15” does not mean ‘multiples of’ in the Express Lane, both to shame and annoy the people ahead of him at Kroger.

Castor truly cares about everyone, even the ones that annoy Pollux. I think Pollux cares too, but is far more churlish about it.

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Providence 14 Theatre Review

Is up and kicking over at Metroblog Nashville.

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I’m Off To See The Movies

Today is the Soft opening of Providence 14 theatres.

I’m headed up that way with camera in hand to cover the story for Metroblog Nashville.

Didn’t that sound important? Don’t you just love the way I made playing-hooky-to-see-CARS sound like I was doing something worthwhile?

At any rate, if I can recover my Metblog password, the story will be up there tonight.

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I Call Bulls…..! The Kleinheider Death Penalty Special Edition

I realise that long responses to the Kleinheider are generally the province of Feline Little Britches, but I couldn’t pass this one up. (My apologies, fair Auntie.)

Deep in the heart of his reflection on the execution of Sedley Alley (A man who beat, stabbed and repeatedly sexually assaulted a 19 year old servicewoman), Adam ribs us with this little nugget:

I am a bit ambivalent on the death penalty. While I have no problem morally wilth a man dying for spilling blood, I do have a problem with giving the State the power over the life and death of its citizens.

Back to the whole my-mom-was-a-teacher thing from earlier……Her pet peeve was when students would say “Mrs. B failed me in English.” Unfailingly, for forty years her reply was always “you got the grade you earned.”

American citizens have their own power of life and death. Don’t commit a capital crime. If you do commit a capital crime, offer a defense when tried by the jury of your peers. And when going through the many-tiered mandatory appeals process.

The state of Tennessee has no power over the life and death of me or (hopefully) you, because we are not walking into a restaurant and shooting the kids who are there to earn money for their car insurance and college educations. You and I are not going to shove a stick so far up a woman’s vagina that it pierces her liver. These actions represent a choices made by free citizens. The death penalty is merely the State’s response to those wrong choices.

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