Vox Nova

I’ll start with politics this morning.  There are three races I’m watching: California, Kentucky, and Nevada.  Presently, Boxer is leading in polling in CA, Paul is leading in KY, and Reid is even with Angle in NV.  The GOP needs to pull 2 of 3 to have a chance at retaking the Senate.  If they pull 3 of 3, the GOP will most definitely retake the Senate.  My intuition is the GOP wins 1 of 3.  The House will follow a similar dynamic, but be easier for the GOP to reclaim.  I don’t believe it is a given that the GOP will reclaim the House, but I’m not surprised that people are pushing for that expectation.  I think the generic ballot is deceiving a lot of people due to the GOP’s enormous edge in the South that is bringing up the national numbers.

Since I’m bored at the moment, I’ll go ahead and analyze all the Senate contested races. Read the rest of this entry »

No argument will prevail against a person who believes good is subjective.

“The liberal case against gay marriage” is an article in the Summer 2004 issue of The Public Interest by Susan M. Shell.  While I don’t expect universal agreement with it, I’m curious what our readers think of the article.

For those wishing to comment, I’m not interested in what you think about Same Sex Marriage.  I’m interested in what you think of Shell’s arguments.

Often those of us who make mistakes are reticent to admit them publicly.  Unfortunately what results is that people are misled.  Today, I wish to confess that I went to a for-profit diploma mill.  I graduated from there in 2001 with an Associate’s Degree in Information Technology.  There were red flags from the beginning.  I had the option of continuing my investment for another year and earning a bachelor’s degree.  I declined to do so for a number of reasons, some personal.  One of the reasons I declined to do so was that it was apparent at that point that the degree was not going to offer any more street cred.

People shouldn’t get too wrapped up in education getting you a job.  At its minimum, it is a ticket in the door, although the value of that ticket shouldn’t be underestimated.  At its best, it, particularly vocation education, provides a path to understanding present and future technologies.  Having said that, education does have value for its own sake.  That is true in direct and indirect ways in regards to potential careers.  Nothing can replace the value of a good theoretical education.  While it is of course possible to get a good education outside of a traditional university, it takes significantly longer, takes more effort, and requires significant discipline in order to do so.  There are no shortcuts in life.  As one of the many IT professionals flooded into the market, I found myself in a professional dead end.  I will hopefully have my bachelor’s degree in two years from a real university in a more traditional educational area offering real potential career avenues.  Your time is valuable.  Don’t waste it in a for profit diploma mill.

The silent majority is a fairly ubiquitous rhetorical device.  Often enough, we like to imagine ourselves a part of it.  Even if the silent majority isn’t being falsely invoked in some cause – it prefers to be left alone – it certainly is real.  At some point you realize in life that people are more likely to tell you what you want to hear than to tell you what they really think.  Anonymous surveying has cleared up some of this, but even that isn’t always reliable.  For example, a survey is taken every Thanksgiving asking people how much they plan to spend on Christmas gifts over the Thanksgiving Day weekend.  When the results are compared to retail receipts, we find the data is near worthless.  Compounding this issue is that people have a terrible tendency to change their minds and don’t really plan near as much as they think they do.  Think of the story of the college aged boy who tells his roommates that he has had it and is finally going to break up with his girlfriend.  Later we find out that instead he bought her dinner and a movie.  The relevant information often isn’t before us. Read the rest of this entry »

Property is one of those things that should be simple enough to discuss.  The tendency though is to define it.  And once it is defined, the tendency is to treat the definition as immutable.  Property however isn’t a simple thing.  It is a social construct.

To start, let’s take a simple example.  George has been working at a factory for 15 years.  XYZ corporation decides that George is too old.  They take George’s job and give it to Larry.  Other than age, there is no change in compensation scheme or ability.  Was George the victim of an unjust taking?  In the present generation, most would say no.  An older generation may have argued that XYZ corporation has a duty not to arbitrarily and capriciously remove George from his position.  They would have argued that perhaps giving George’s job to Larry could have been justified were Larry significantly more skilled or seeking significantly less compensation.  On what basis would they argued that George was mistreated?  They would have argued that taking away George’s livelihood presents a significant cost to George and his family.  They would have argued that those costs could reverberate to the whole community.  While some will surely doubt me here, we have already legally proscribed many similar things.  For example, it is illegal to fire a woman for getting pregnant.  We have banned age discrimination.  In many ways a man’s work is his property. Read the rest of this entry »

As my children age, I’m giving more thought to how I want to advise them on the next stages of their lives.  (My oldest children are in elementary school.)  My conflict is quite simple really.  On the one hand, I want them to be open to love and family formation well before thirty.  On the other hand, I want them to have graduate degrees and be secure in their ability to provide for their families.  All I need is a third option here, and I could say pick any two of three, as goes any number of things in life.  Like any good father, I don’t want my children to needlessly suffer, but the nature of life is that of suffering. Read the rest of this entry »

There seem to be few days that go by where someone doesn’t say, “Do what you love, and you won’t ever have to work a day in your life,” or some variation of this cliche.  Sometimes it is a person in a highly compensated field making that claim.  More often it is a person that has settled and feels some obligation not to make a young man cynical.  About the only cliche that is worse is the one about about hanging out a shingle and making your own job. Read the rest of this entry »

As is the case with FEHB plans currently, and with the Affordable Care Act and the President’s related Executive Order more generally, in Pennsylvania and in all other states abortions will not be covered in the Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP) except in the cases of rape or incest, or where the life of the woman would be endangered. – Department of Health and Human Services (emphasis added for those with difficulty reading a full sentence.)

This statement has been released for over 12 hours now.  It has been linked from this site for that length of time.  Yet if you go around the Catholic blogosphere, you still have people repeating NRLC’s speculative and now proven erroneous analysis.  While it is understandable that many of these places ran with this speculation, there is no good excuse for them not to have informed their readers of the truth.

Lifesite of course has not corrected their initial story, nor have they found HHS’s statement newsworthy.

CNA ran with the story, but at least noted that it was critics making the claim.   (This is not the USCCB’s media arm.)  They have not found HHS’s statement newsworthy.

Father Zuhlsdorf has run with the story and found his readers aren’t worthy of knowing the truth.

Jimmy Akin of the National Catholic Register doesn’t believe his readers are worthy of knowing the truth.

The American Catholic doesn’t fail to keep its readers ignorant.  (Update 9:46:  Blackadder of The American Catholic notes HHS release and responds.)

There are a myriad of other sites that don’t respect their readers.  (All claims are accurate as of this writing.  It is my hope that places actually do correct their misinformation.)

Minor Update:  A lot of sites have reported that the Obama administration is “officially” supporting abortion now when they made their accusations.  Obama does “officially” support abortion rights.  His campaign website noted this.  However, when the controlling agencies, in this case HHS and PA, specifically deny a proffered interpretation (and they have done so from the start), it is intellectually dishonest to claim the agencies are officially supporting a policy.  Official is a first party determination, not a third party one.

How one defines this will help to shape one’s ideology.  Her in the States, we primarily define freedom as lacking impedance from the law.  When we think of people who aren’t free, our minds go immediately to prisoners.  It is most often the metaphor we seek when describing other things.  For example, one might say that he is a prisoner to the sexual norms of a society.  Needless to say our country has a very liberal view of freedom, something that isn’t entirely shocking given our founding. Read the rest of this entry »

The Distributist Review has launched a new site.  Bookmark it.  Visit it.  Enjoy it.

The cry of an Iraqi boy upon the arrival of American soldiers seems appropriate to note our national day of independence.  Perhaps with that now old cry we can finally end some of the pretensions we keep ourselves under here.  One of those pretensions is that we are a Christian nation.  Another pretension is that we are basically a good society.  Another pretension is that our society has moved beyond class. Read the rest of this entry »

The House of Representatives approved another bill yesterday attempting to restore expiring unemployment benefits.   The Senate still cannot get a bill passed.  Those voting against in the House are here.  Republicans are in italics.  Independents are underlined.  In the Wisconsin delegation, Paul Ryan and Jim Sensenbrenner voted against the bill.  Paul Ryan has a closed GM plant in his district.  Janesville’s unemployment rate is 10.4%, down from 12.8% in April.

In the Senate there is a bill in limbo for continuing unemployment benefits.  Prior to the depression we’ve experienced, unemployment benefits ended at 26 weeks.  These benefits had been extended.  In some states they were up to 99 weeks.  By not passing this bill, roughly 1.3 million people will stop receiving unemployment assistance almost immediately.  This is happening in a time where many states have unemployment rates exceeding 10%.  This bill which would continue unemployment benefits failed a cloture vote.  I compiled a year ago a list of Senators that supported the bailout of Wall Street executives and opposed supporting autoworkers and workers employed at auto suppliers. Among those people, these are the one’s voting for the unemployed to eat cake.

Read the rest of this entry »

The gospel today was quite interesting to me.  For those attending children at the time, we meet two men that desire to follow Jesus.  One is rebuked for wanting to bury his father before becoming a disciple.  The other is rebuked for wanting to wish his parents farewell.  The first reading today is of Elisha being called by God.  Elisha desires to wish his parents farewell.  Elisha is allowed to so do so however, and having done so, he follows Elijah, although he does sacrifice his oxen.  With “Here I Am Lord” still in my head, I don’t think I had difficulty understanding the message father was trying to impart this morning. Read the rest of this entry »

Politics gets a bad name for itself.  Too often it is just cynically dismissed.  Political cynicism is one of those bipartisan values.  It’s embraced by moderates and reactionaries.  I certainly do understand the frustrations, having fallen into the temptation myself.  While we can entertain a myriad of logical possibilities toward solving our societal problems in our ideological sanctuaries, politics smothers those possibilities into metaphysical ones that aren’t always inclusive of our fifth preference, let alone our first. Read the rest of this entry »

There seems to be an underlying assumption that the US would be better off if more people rented and fewer people owned dwellings.  Often folks point to places like Europe where it isn’t unusual for the middle class to rent their dwellings.  Many people will point to economic incentives like the mortgage interest deduction while neglecting to note that price to rent ratios already indicated a significant discount for renters for comparable properties.  The magic factor that makes renting in Europe more attractive than renting in the US is regulation favorable to renters.  But a recent study by a George Mason university economics hack claimed that it was unenlightened to think that housing regulations could do anything but add cost.  A conundrum.

Honda resolved a two-week strike at a transmission plant in southern China by offering 1,900 workers there raises of 24 to 32 percent.

But the success of that walkout, which ended a week ago, seems to have prompted additional strikes at a time when workers in China are awakening to the idea of collective bargaining and demanding higher wages.

New York Times

This is just terrible news.  This means that some capitalist will be forced to suffer and might have to walk his own dog rather than employing the services of a dog walker.  It will also make the workers lazy and unproductive.  Does China really want to look like Detroit?  When will people learn that socialism is wrong?

The Ochlophobist is a convert to Orthodoxy.  He isn’t hesitant to criticize the Americanization of Orthodoxy.  Here he addresses it with Catholicism, using as his foil Fr. Jay Scott Newman’s piece on Evangelical Catholicism.  A brief tease:

The religious psychology behind the “personal relationship with the Lord Jesus” is among the most interesting religious phenomena in modernity. The notion of the “personal relationship with the Lord Jesus” asserts an unmediated personal relationship between the believer and Jesus, but as we have seen this relationship is in fact mediated via a host of rituals and ritual language. Yet, like the Quaker whose Quaker meetings follow a near exact routine 99.8% of the time, we have a religious psychology here which fervently expresses an intention to deny the role of any ritual in mediating the relationship between the believer and Jesus (in the case of Evangelical Catholicism and Byzantine Rite Evangelicalism the stress is put on the ritual only rightly existing for those who have this Evangelical approach to the faith, as we will see below, and the inference that the ritual cannot be approached rightly unless the ‘heart work’ is done first — there is some truth to this, of course; God save us from things that have some truth). In classic evangelicalism this anti-ritual intent is indeed ritually expressed, such as the mention, frequent and routine, in services of how one cannot be saved via rituals, and a whole sub-lingo of anti-ritualism, the repetitive use of which in religious services is itself ritualistic. In those cases where Evangelicalism has been imported into Catholicism or Orthodoxy there is not an overt anti-ritualism, but there remains either a soft assertion or a clear enough inference that the unmediated “Gospel” oriented “personal relationship with the Lord Jesus” soteriologically precedes the role of ritual acts in mediating God to man. Beyond the anti-ritual aspects of this religious psychology, there is the positive assertion and/or intuition that to engage in these deemed non-ritual ritual acts of the “personal relationship with the Lord Jesus” is to actually engage directly with the Lord Jesus. Oftentimes this is sad yet humourous. So often when you listen to the prayers of a person who has a “personal relationship with the Lord Jesus” you find that the content of those prayers consists mostly of assertions to (reminders to) Jesus of Who He is, which, of course, inevitably mimics the conceptualization of Jesus that the believer (and usually his community of believers) wants Jesus to be, and this form of prayer essentially serves to convince the believer that he or she has a “personal relationship with the Lord Jesus” by means of the mental and emotional construction of a Jesus whom the believer “relates” to by way of those acts which construct said Jesus. Does this sound circular? It is.

I’m not going to have much to add here.  I figured I’d add some speculations.

1.  Abortion is typically an outpatient procedure.  This isn’t South America.  Catholic hospitals don’t need to create excuses for performing abortions.  If a person wants to have an abortion in this country, there are facilities that will perform them, no questions asked.  The fact that the person who had the abortion was inpatient and approval had to be sought by a committee should be sufficient evidence that immediate medical conditions required prompt action.   “News” sources that speculate contrariwise are acting irresponsibly unless they have solid evidence.  If they quote a doctor claiming such circumstances never present themselves and from that he renders judgment in a case he has not reviewed, the doctor is committing professional malfeasance.  Read the rest of this entry »

One of the distressing things about being on Facebook is seeing what people think.  There is a gross hostility to Mexicans in particular and Hispanics in general.  People will claim that their hostility only extends to illegal immigrants, but that is nonsense.  In my area, we have a number of Laotian (Hmong) refugees.  For those unfamiliar, this traces itself to the Vietnam War.  While the immigrants have made significant progress economically, I don’t believe members of the Hmong community would consider themselves significantly welcome in Wisconsin, despite our witnessing the 2nd generation coming of age now.

While one can understand that communities tend to be closed and as a consequence outsiders don’t perceive themselves as welcome, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in the cases of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California vis-a-vis Mexico.  Read the rest of this entry »

At some point here, I’m going to write a further post on how “sunshine” and whatnot can in fact make many situations worse rather than always making things better.  Today isn’t that day alas.  While trolling the Internet, I learned that kitty porn crush videos were an essential element of our freedom.  This didn’t bother me too much until I learned that it was Chief Justice Roberts offering this opinion in United States v. Stevens.  Read the rest of this entry »

I’m hesitant to write this kind of post.  In the first instance, it will be seen as defense of the church.  Some will even see it as a defense of sexual predators.  There are a lot of assumptions about sexual abuse, and they carry over into our everyday conversations.  To start, I’m going to just give some basic facts.  These numbers are from the CDC.

1. Among high school students, 8% are reported to have been forced to have sex.  In other words, they were raped.  By gender, the breakdown is 11% of females and 5% of males.  To put that in perspective, I go to a fairly large parish where a mass will have 500 people.  So at any mass, I will likely be with 40 rapes victims, roughly 28 female and 12 male.
2. 1 in 6 women and 1 in 33 men have reported an attempted or completed rape in their lives.  At my parish mass, this would translate to 42 women and 8 men.  (These are two different surveys which is why in part there is a discrepancy between 1 and 2.  CDC is citing DOJ numbers here.)  These are just reported cases.

Another web site is Darkness to Light, which has a reference section that appears reputable.   Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know how I got the celebrity beat at Vox Nova, but for whatever reason I always find what seems to me to be an interesting wrinkle in parts of our pop culture.  Over the past few months or so, the world has been buzzing about golfer Tiger Woods.  Words like redemption and greatness are thrown around.

I was at a small social gathering several weeks ago, and the topic of Tiger Woods came up.  The host pondered whether we should forgive Tiger and forget his indiscretions.  I never really felt a personal obligation in that regard.  I stated simply that the guy was scum for what he did.  I know, little old judgmental me.  The host in fact offered that Tiger Woods had opportunities and pressures that more easily facilitated rampant infidelity.  After close to a decade of marriage, I know that one doesn’t have to be Tiger Woods to cheat.  Having worked in a couple of hotels and driven a taxi cab, I’m well aware of the stuff needed to cheat: the ability to fog a mirror is a good start, but I’m not even sure that’s required.   Well, the host acknowledged the low barriers to entry for an aspiring adulterer.  He then went on to exhort that one must acknowledge Woods’s greatness on the golf course. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the issues that is recurring is the insistence that I (or others) confess that I am liberal or of the left.  For some, you will find the allegation absolutely hilarious.  Others will offer some variation of the expression “duh.”  I would have considered being called a liberal or a leftist a few years ago fighting words, as would many of my fellow contributors.  At one time, I think almost every single one of us was a regular listener to the Rush Limbaugh program and not because we had significant disagreements.  I’ve owned two of his books and was a regular listener.  I should confess that I stopped listening though a couple of years before I significantly deviated from mainstream conservatism. Read the rest of this entry »

[March 24]‘s front-page story in the New York Times suggests that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), under the direction of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, failed to act against a Wisconsin priest who was accused of molesting scores of boys at a school for the deaf.

Is the story damaging? Yes. Should the Vatican have acted faster? Yes. Should the accused priest have been laicized? In all probability, Yes again.

Lawler’s story is here.  He goes on to list several points that I would encourage you to read. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve read too many variations of Stupak turned his back on us for me to allow some time for mourning and reasoning before I offer advice that will be disregarded again.  Let’s get a few things straight.  First, the pro-life movement turned its back on health care reform.  Some like Thomas Peters at American Papist were honest that they could care less how the unborn fared because they weren’t supporting health care reform no matter what.  That’s not fair.  No, they reserved the right to whine and complain – and complain endlessly they did – but when it came to actually bringing something to the table, like votes, they’d have to look elsewhere.  Pretty much all the pro-life organizations followed this tack.  With leadership like this, the unborn don’t need enemies. Read the rest of this entry »

When Father Z offers one of his thrice daily prayers to Denver, his followers go a little crazy:

How dare he place covering immigrants on the same moral level as abortion. — Heather

You make a good point, Heather.
And honestly, I don’t know when the Church has ever approved of Socialism,where what belongs to the haves is stolen to give to the have-nots. — kat

And those are just the first two comments.  More entertainment ensues.  What is made blindingly clear is that these folks don’t care about the uninsured  …

.. and they really don’t care about abortion either.

Life is messy.  Archbishop Chaput has made a federal case, to use an expression, out of a situation in a parish school.  Supporters of the Archbishop have argued that scandal has been created by the school accepting the children of a lesbian couple as students.  Critics have noted the real and publicly knowledgeable sins of other parents such as invalid marriages, at least in the abstract although neither I nor you as the reader should have doubt over their representation, and they have noted that the school accepts non-Catholic children.  The lesbian parents have not spoken publicly at this point and have stated their intention not to do so. Read the rest of this entry »

There was an earthquake in a country in South America.  The anglicized pronunciation sounds like the spice chili.  The Spanish proununciation is Ch-ee’-lay.  Chill-lay’ is the pronunciation used by many people in the media and the faux-sophisticated.

I guess we are condemned to discuss torture once again.  Dr. Tollefsen wrote an article on Marc Thiessen’s misuse of double effect.  In the article, Tollefsen states, “…I do not address the question of Catholic teaching on torture….”  He is addressing Thiessen’s argument.  In specific, he argues that action taken against a person for not cooperating are discrete from the reception of the cooperation.  As such, the act of inducing the cooperation must at least be morally neutral for the two acts taken in totality to be licit.  In short, he is arguing that there is a clear violation of the 3rd test of the principle of double effect: we cannot do evil so that good may come.  This is certainly okay as far as it goes, but it does not get to the heart of the Church’s objection to torture. Read the rest of this entry »

As I stated in my previous post, defenders of torture are removing the ticking time bomb from their defense.  5 years ago, plus or minus, those that wanted to remain respectable made a big deal about torture not being illicit in the case of a ticking time bomb.  They did this in part to avoid having to defend each and every instance that our government used torture.  In particular, the revelations of Abu Ghraib were fresh, and there was no need to defend what went on there, because the dominant narrative was that the acts resulted from individuals acting on their volitions.  Additionally, an absolute prohibition of torture (or torture-like acts, since they didn’t wish to concede that what they were describing was torture) had the unpleasant  effect of leaving us impotent in the face of very constrained scenarios.  This condition has a long history of being shocking to American sensibilities as was shown when the Vatican wrote that they did not find embryo adoption to be the best solution to embryos leftover from IVF.  It was generally conceded at the time that ticking time bombs would be exceptional, since they had the requirements both of immediate general knowledge and having a known conspirator in custody with immediate and specific knowledge.  It was always conceded that raping the conspirator’s wife, for example, would be wrong in an effort to coerce a conspirator. Read the rest of this entry »

I have a shocking and surprising announcement to make:  Vox Nova has not seen and does not see itself as a tool for promotion of the Republican Party or the “conservative values” of both those within that party and those formerly affiliated with the Republican Party but who are disaffected by that party and still think the Democrats are worse.  From reading around the blogosphere, this seems to have been revelatory to some people.  Yes, we recognize that some of us (certainly not all) have violated the non-negotiable principle of only voting for Republicans and violated the divine sanction against supporting government, except when it enters immoral wars and tortures people, by supporting a health care bill that will force people who today receive abortion coverage from their employer’s plan to explicitly pay for abortion coverage if they purchase private coverage through a government exchange.  For those that persevere with us and even bother to call themselves Catholic, we’ll keep you in our prayers.

Several Catholic blogs have made comments that those opposed to torture are too shrill.  We are claimed to be divisive.  And the plain truth is that after at least a half decade of having our country commit torture, including to the point of having tortured people to death (obviously denied or otherwise attempted to be excused), many of us have difficulty seeing the good will of those who defend our country’s practices.  Further, our country has clearly not limited its use of torture to the difficult case of a known and imminent threat, aka the ticking time bomb.  And for all the alleged nuance of those supporting “enhanced interrogation”, we find such things as over half the country supporting the torture of Abdulmutallab, the underwear bomber, for the sadistic purpose of going on a fishing expedition, figuring he must have other information of use.  In fact, Raymond Arroyo’s personal moral theologian on torture, Marc Thiessen, found President Obama’s unwillingness to use torture against Abdulmutallab to be negligent.  Yes, this is the man that EWTN is hosting.  This is the man whose voice needed to be aired – no, supportively promulgated – on the leading worldwide Catholic television station.  Why not just offer a sympathetic platform to NARAL – Catholic for Choice would be too moderate – for crying out loud?  There are times for moderation.  This is not one of them.  If EWTN wants to liberally support torture, that is its business.  It has no business calling itself Catholic while doing it though.

Ross Douthat wrote a fairly innocuous column in the NY Times recently.  In it, he argues what I have long held: sex education programs in schools – abstinence and otherwise – are largely ineffective.  Again we are largely dealing with the clinicalization of a social problem where the remedy is more education.  The idea that young women aren’t engaging in pregnancy avoidance, because they aren’t interested in avoiding pregnancy is an idea that seems completely alien. Read the rest of this entry »

Over at Father Zuhlsdorf’s blog WDTPRS, there is an interesting discussion over Bishop Olmsted deciding the Diocese of Phoenix will require 9 months of marriage prep.  As one who married outside the church, I just have to say this is insane.  Additionally, a full NFP course will be on the menu.  Nothing says I love you more than asking the woman you love to get married, so that you can have sex and avoid pregnancy.  Read the rest of this entry »

There are certain classes of movies I generally don’t take well.  This movie was lining up through the first third to be one of those.  I do not handle portrayals of the neglect and abuse of children well.  The movie portrays the youth of now tackle for the Baltimore Ravens Michael Oher.  His father was never around.  His mother had lost herself to drug dependency, specifically cocaine.  He fled the foster care system.  He stayed at the homes of friends and was homeless.  Eventually he is taken in by a wealth white couple where he gains stability and eventually thrives.  It becomes a beautiful movie. Read the rest of this entry »

I was at a confirmation not too many moons ago.  At the confirmation, the bishop noted that the prior bishop and the one currently running the diocese had practiced quizzing the candidates.  He had thought about asking the candidates a simple question like “What is the significance and meaning of the Incarnation?”  After a few chuckles were exchanged – and I imagine some worried looks – the bishop stated that he was old enough that he would continue doing things the way he had and not quiz the candidates. Read the rest of this entry »

Those familiar with my writing recognize that I tend to be more curmudgeonly around Christmas.  Today I will enter the virtual confessional and confess that I have allowed myself to become lax in my own ideals.

When my Irish twins were under 4, they didn’t have toys of their own.  The toys they had could be used by either child.  Half a decade later or about 6 months ago, I instituted the rule banning fighting over items worth less then 50 cents.  This rule does surprisingly need enforcement among the big kids, but it also sees enforcement with the presence of a 3-year-old.  Needless to say, desire for property seems to be intrinsic to children as witnessed by the Toddler’s Creed.  (A sample verse: “If I want it, it’s mine.”)  Read the rest of this entry »

Every now and then, people read a story and find significant a detail I find to be insignificant.  This is one of those times.  In this case, Maurice Clemmons stands accused of murdering four police officers in Washington, and the fact I find to be insignificant is that nine years ago he was granted clemency by then governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee.  The significant detail to me was that:

He was released from custody just six days ago, even though [sic] was staring at seven additional felony charges in Washington state.

The State of Washington felt $150,000 was adequate (in real terms to Clemmons, this meant $15,000) to secure their interests and the security of its people.  However we are to believe that Mike Huckabee is to bear the burden for this act by granting clemency after a decade to a person who committed his crimes when he was just 17. Read the rest of this entry »