This explains why I don't have any gay relatives or acquaintances I know of

How Many Americans Are Lesbian, Gay or Bisexual?

It's not that I particularly do or don't want to, I just don't think I know any Luxembourgians either.

(Incidentally, when I first read the title of that blog or whatever I read it as Well!, as in Huh - how about that.)

Seems to me that this is going to make hording by the gay hordes an uphill climb at best ("c'mon guys, there's 2 of us for every 98 of them; we've got history and the numbers on our side!") unless aided and abetted by those they might want to climb over - or by demagoguing ex-Catholic bloggers and others skillfully using the "crisis" to promote their personal agendas.

OK, I admit it

I have a taste for completely insane writing. Every once in awhile I come across something on the internet that I have to read until the end. It's like a roller coaster—you can't get off until it stops. So here's the latest, and I'll excerpt my favorite parts below with all misspellings and grammatical errors left intact.

Lets go back a few thousands of Years when the Hebrews were taken from the hands of the Great Pharoah of Egypt. This was planned even before Moses came into being. It was Lord Enlil's Wonderful Idea to distablize the Reigns of Control from the EN KI TITES. From the Rebel Reptilian Queen and her nasty Grey Co-horts.

Lord Enlil's henchmen helped the Hebrews to leave Bondage only to become Pawns for Lord Enlil. The So Called Promised Land was Canaan , the Lands of the Giants, the Sons of Olympus. The Hebrews Wondered for 40years in the Wilderness and then after this Terrible Ordeal in the Wilderness the Hebrews were Conditioned and Trained to become Bloodthirsty Warriors, they had 40 Years of Training by Lord Enlil's Canus Warriors via Extraterrestrial Intervention.

The Hebrews had to follow Orders Period if they didn't the Canus UFO's would drop nasty Snakes to Bite the Hebrews and Poison them untill they served the Will of Lord Enlil ( Yahweh ). Many Hebrews Died by these Snakes and the Hebrews out of Great Fear from the Kods above surrendered their Free Will to the Will of Lord Enlil. The Hebrews became a tuned Army like no other and basically Marched to the Land of Caanan and with the Help of Enlils Space Ships they attacked Canaan.

The Canaanites were Powerful Titans with Awsome Size & Strength and they saw the Attack coming but they did not see the Cloaked Spaceships of Lord Enlil. The Armies marched towards the Cananite Army, the Hebrews engaged the Titans and were basically squashed like mash Potatoes but the Spaceships above launched a really good Assault which caused Panic among the Giants , this Panic was the Adavantage the Hebrews Needed to Kill every Man , Woman & Child in Canaan, Including the Large Beasts which fed the Colony.

So to this Day the Hebrews are not Free, they are Pawns and Slaves. How about Abraham he was played with Emotionally to kill his beloved Son on the Altar. Many Humans Fight and Kill each other so that those who are Above Laugh , Riddicule and Entertain themselves for their own Amusements ( Those Being Extraterrestrials ).

So just who is really the Bad Guy here?, the Pharoah did make the Hebrews work their Asses off, but he did provide Work, Homes, Food & Shelter for his so called Slaves. Lord Enlil provided a Promised Land?, a Land flowing with Milk & Honey?, more Like a Land of Blood & Carnage.

Now lets look into the Future , we come across a Messiah , Jesus Christ the Lamb of Enlil. Preaching Peace , did anyone know that Barabas was the Son of Jesus? , many still do not know this, Jesus was a Pawn also to play with the Hearts of Men. He did a fabulous Job and he served Lord Enlil very well. We look into the Future after his Crucifixtion and what do we see?, we see the Church being formed from the Roman Empire, we see an Emporer by the name of Constantine who created the Bible to make himself a GOD/DOG (Canus King).

No, I did not "know" that Barabbas was the son of Jesus. I do know that every neo-gnostic like this dude likes to say Jesus had kids; I have no idea why. I also know that the name Barabbas means "Son of the Father" in Hebrew, which to me makes a much more interesting story since he was a robber, murderer and all around rabble-rouser who was released when Christ was condemned.

I also did not know that the Emperor Constantine created the Bible, evidently going back in time to do so. Neither did I have any idea that Jews are pawns and slaves even "to this day". I'm not sure that's completely true; at least some of the Jews out there are well off and have good jobs.

You'll have to RTWT if you want to get to the big Catholic-bashing paragraph and the small Islam-bashing sentence or two that he throws in for equal time. My only remaining question: why go out and pay money for Dan Brown pulp when you can get much richer stuff like this for free? And the grammatical mistakes just make it all more fun. Plus this guy throws a lot more capital letters into the mix than are required. Again, 100% free of charge.

Moral Clarity

Charlie K brings the moral clarity, but it feels like a waste of time even as it reads like the Truth. Excerpt:

Rarely does international politics present a moment of such moral clarity. Yet we routinely hear this Israel-Gaza fighting described as a morally equivalent “cycle of violence.” This is absurd. What possible interest can Israel have in cross-border fighting? Everyone knows Hamas set off this mini-war. And everyone knows the proudly self-declared raison d’etre of Hamas: the eradication of Israel and its Jews.

Apologists for Hamas attribute the blood lust to the Israeli occupation and blockade. Occupation? Does no one remember anything? It was less than 10 years ago that worldwide television showed the Israeli army pulling die-hard settlers off synagogue roofs in Gaza as Israel uprooted its settlements, expelled its citizens, withdrew its military and turned every inch of Gaza over to the Palestinians. There was not a soldier, not a settler, not a single Israeli left in Gaza.

And there was no blockade. On the contrary. Israel wanted this new Palestinian state to succeed. To help the Gaza economy, Israel gave the Palestinians its 3,000 greenhouses that had produced fruit and flowers for export. It opened border crossings and encouraged commerce.

The reason it seems like a waste of time is that the people determined to perpetuate the ridiculous "cycle of violence" meme sound so morally superior to everyone. The sense I get from them is "Yes, yes, we know that one side may be more to blame that the other, but really, this part of the world has been fighting for hundreds and thousands of years. It's time to stop pointing fingers...." No! I want more finger pointing. What is wrong with a one-state solution, run by grown-ups (Israelis) where we recognize who's to blame for the violence (Palestinians)? And anyone who doesn't like that can move to one of the other wonderful Muslim countries in the area. If they'll allow them in.

Pray for my friend

For anyone who prays, please pray for my friend. He needs a lot of prayer. He suffers from bi-polar disorder, but he flatly refuses to take medication or pursue any course of treatment whatsoever. He is getting worse and worse. From time to time he hallucinates and believes he is hearing voices. He cannot hold down a job for more than about 3 weeks.

The only hope for him is a change of heart and a decision to be honest, to admit he has a mental problem and pursue some course of treatment. That is why the only thing we can do is pray. He is an extremely brilliant person and he used to be an easy-going, fun, friendly guy. But now he is paranoid and thinks everyone trying to help him actually means some type of harm to him. It is intensely painful for me to watch him slowly lose his sanity and everything else besides.

The Incredible Shrinking Prezzie

It would seem that Obama has stumbled down from the dictator's throne onto planet earth and has become just another aspiring street weirdo with a few extra bucks in his pocket. Excerpt:

Calling himself "the bear," he has taken to roaming the streets around Washington, dropping in at fast food stops and bothering customers. But he jumped the shark on a trip out West last week, when he skirted the crisis convulsing the border to hang out and chill with the folks. "What exactly is going on with the leader of the free world?" asked the Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin, having watched him in Denver eat pizza with strangers, shoot pool with the governor, and shake hands with "a guy on the street" who was wearing a horse's head mask.

Andrea Mitchell attacked him for horsing around while ignoring a crisis, asking Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar what he imagined Obama was thinking, and why. Cueller replied that the pictures had "floored" him: "He’s saying he’s too busy to go down to the border, but you have time to drink beer and play pool."

As Eilperin notes, he’s "trying to free himself from the constraints of office ... but to some, breaking free can also look like running away." It can look to some others like "having a breakdown." Obama will not be the fourth president (if you count Nixon) to be impeached, but he may become the first to be led away by the hand to a nice, quiet place where he can get treatment. And that would make history, too.

Maybe this episode of shooting pool on which I commented several days back will be seen in the future as a watershed moment in the Age of Obama where a bunch of former lackeys and supporters woke up and said "Uh-oh, where he be gone?" Hopefully an insane Obama wandering through the streets and channeling Joe Biden's giddiness won't be as dangerous as an Obama dictating policy.

I'm formally dubbing Obama "President Gas". I don't know if the P-Furs would agree, but the line "President gas on everything but roller skates" just sort of popped into my head.



Wow, I remember wearing out that cassette.

Brought to you by the publisher of "The" "American" "Conservative"

We have some fun here, from time to time, chatting about the dyed-in-the-wool conservative chops of Wick Allison, publisher of The American Conservative.  Which, in the same manner that a roundtable is neither round nor a table, is neither "American" nor "Conservative".  (For a refresher, here's Allison's Cub Reporter discussing the boss's renewed support for Obama in 2012, and chiming in his view that Obama was better choice than Romney on foreign policy and economic issues -- quite the oracle, given recent events.)

Anyhoo, Wick Allison's other vehicle is D Magazine, which is one of those print and online rags about what is trendy and cool in a particular city.  D is of course about Dallas.  In the recent issue, D published an online ranking (don't know if it's in the print version) of the various suburbs in the Dallas area.  The city of Rockwall, TX was ranked #16 out of 63 (yes, we have a lot of suburbs here).  But it is the six-paragraph story accompanying the ranking that raised a bit of a foo-fraw on local AM talk radio today.  The story noted that Rockwall is the hometown of US Congressman Ralph Hall, who is 91 years young and who was recently beaten in the GOP primary by a Tea Partier, and then quoted a local barber thusly:

 “I’ve been cutting Ralph Hall’s hair for 20 years, his kinfolk’s even longer,” he says, pointing to a framed picture of the congressman. “He’s a gentleman. That guy who beat him? He’s an asshole. All these assholes have moved in here. I had a better clientele 20 years ago, no assholes.” 

So there you go.  According to D Magazine, a city loaded with Tea Party "assholes" makes it into the top quartile of suburbs.

And yes, they're hiding behind the "we're not saying that, it's just what we heard" defense.  But it seems an odd paragraph for the publisher of The American Conservative to have in a six-paragraph blurb.

Pat, I don't know what he's talking about.

Commenter Pat writes this on a St. Francisville Topix thread, referring to Rod Dreher's blog on "The" "American" "Conservative":

There's a lot of things still going on around Ruthie [Leming]. One recent post shows Rod [Dreher] picking up Hannah in NOLA as if he was the man of that family. Another, "The Little Way of LeBron James", has something to do with Rod's book about Ruthie having something to do with LeBron James returning to Cleveland. Pauli, I see you're from Cleveland. Is that so? Whatever, Rod seems to be all over the Leming family these days, but maybe only in the same way you'd want to shake your leg to get him off. How do the Lemings feel about all this? Normally I'd think this was a private matter, but Rod keeps making it so public it seems okay to ask about.

I've never fathomed the way the mind of Dreher works, nor really even been able to even follow his line of reasoning. I've admitted as much on several occasions, notably here and here. That applies doubly to the post to which Pat is referring.

Initially my reaction to Dreher's titling the book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming was confusion. Little Way is obviously a reference to St. Therese the Little Flower, a Saint and Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church, the church which Dreher famously left. The only notable similarity between the two women seems to be that they both died young, Therese at 24 and Ruthie at 41 years of age. (I write more about the problematic "saint" moniker and comparison in my Amazon book review.)

Now he comes out with the post title The Little Way of LeBron James which fails further at coherence. After all, the way of Ruthie Leming was little precisely because she was the one who stayed in the hometown and didn't leave to seek her fortune elsewhere, let alone enshrine the choice in a television special with the grandiose title The Decision. Little Way? not so much.

I think what he really is attempting is a comparison between LeBron James and himself, even though he throws the name in for Ruthie's. He was the one who, like James, left and came back. But this seems to be projection and merely another failed metaphor. There are plenty of people who move back home after living somewhere else. My neighbors, for example, lived in Michigan (gasp!) for years before coming back to Cleveland and starting a business (husband) and getting elected to public office (wife). My parents moved back to the town we grew up in about 10 years ago. And I have friends whose kids moved away about 5 years ago but they're moving back now that John Kasich and Josh Mandel and have fixed the economy here in Ohio.

I mean really, the coming back home theme is so old and commonplace that the observation that James's reasons for coming home somewhat match his own at points seem to be the presentation of a truism as some type of cosmic revelation. Also, check this out: LeBron James was famous and a superstar before he left Cleveland and after he left, a number of people got irritated. Now he's come back even more famous and a bigger superstar and almost everybody is elated around here, even a nerd like me is experiencing second-hand joyfulness. Reading the Topix thread I referenced earlier will show you that this is not always to case when a famous person returns home.

David French explains what reasonable response should mean

David French explains why wiping out Hamas would be perfectly reasonable for Israel to do.

When an enemy force consistently and deliberately does all that it can to terrorize and kill as many of your citizens as possible, with no regard for the difference between military and civilian targets, the “reasonable” thing to do is obliterate that enemy. Destroy it. There is nothing unreasonable about self-defense, and there is nothing unreasonable about destroying an armed enemy force. In fact, our own military has a long and proud history of destroying enemy armed forces, and our nation and the world tend to achieve far better outcomes when our military is given the free hand to do the truly reasonable thing: defeat the enemy.

But since we’re defining “reasonable,” let’s also define “unreasonable.”

It is unreasonable to expect Israel to exercise more restraint than the United States would under similar circumstances. It is unreasonable to demand that Israel abide by made-up rules of “proportionality” that we’ve rightly rejected for our own armed forces. It is unreasonable to assume that the so-called “honest broker” role requires this nation to blind itself to truth and violate its own laws by funneling hundreds of millions of dollars per year to a terrorist “unity” government.

The world will never be free of violence, but a world with no Hamas would be better than a world with Hamas. That's for sure.

I've always thought the Israelis are far too nice to people who behave like wild animals.

H/T ACLJ.

Saint Pius XII: Commentary on St. Benedict

Pope Pius the XII provides the commentary for today's feast day. I found it to be interesting reading.

While the century had grown old in vice, while Italy and all Europe seemed to be a wretched theater for the life and death struggle of nations, and even the monastic discipline was weakened with worldliness and was not up to the task of resisting ..., Benedict proved the perennial youth of the Church by his outstanding sanctity and work; he restored morality by his teaching and example; he protected the sanctuary of religious life with safer and holier laws. Nor was that all; he and his followers reclaimed the uncultured tribes from their wild life to civic and Christian culture; directing them to the practice of virtue, industry and the peaceful arts and literature, he united them in the bonds of fraternal affection and charity...

Cassino, as all know, was the chief dwelling place and the main theater of the Holy Patriarch's virtue and sanctity. From the summit of this mountain, while practically on all sides ignorance and the darkness of vice kept trying to overshadow and envelop everything, a new light shone, kindled by the teaching and civilization of old and further enriched by the precepts of Christianity; it illumined the wandering peoples and nations, recalled them to truth and directed them along the right path...

It was here that Benedict brought the monastic life to that degree of perfection to which he had long aspired by prayer, meditation and practice. The special and chief task that seemed to have been given to him in the designs of God's providence was not so much to impose on the West the manner of life of the monks of the East, as to adapt that life and accommodate it to the genius, needs and conditions of Italy and the rest of Europe. Thus to the placid asceticism which flowered so well in the monasteries of the East, he added laborious and tireless activity which allows the monks "to give to others the fruit of contemplation", and not only to produce crops from uncultivated land, but also to cultivate spiritual fruit through their exhausting apostolate.

But I don't know if St. Benedict sold coffee or not.