Personal Musings category archive

Crossword puzzles that rely on intentionally missplet words are evil and presage the breakdown of civilized society.

Painting walls can be really boring.

Spackle is your friend.

GIven that Jesus says in the Bible that no one can know when he will return, those who claim to predict his return are ipso facto heretics.

My two or three regular readers know that I have for years said that we should have finished with Afghanistan, rather than pursuing the Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq.

But I am more and more coming to conclude that the Bushies wasted too much time on their delusional imperial adventures and that Afghanistan no longer matters.

Shaun Mullen advances powerful arguments at Kiko’s House.

Addendum:

I listened to yesterday’s Radio TImes today; Dick Polman and Trudy Rubin discussed U. S. foreign policy. In it, Trudy Rubin, who has reported on the Middle East and Afghanistan for years, articulates an argument for staying in Afghanistan. It sums up to

America’s leaving Afghanistan too soon ———>
Pakistani support for the return of the Taliban (which is distinct from Al Quaeda) because Pakistan fears Indian influence in Afghanistan ———>
further destabilization of Pakistan from Pakistani religious fundamentalists ———>
increased chance that Pakistan’s nukes fall into the wrong hands.

In her view, Afghanistan is not the issue. Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is.

Trying to balance Mr. Mullen’s and Ms. Rubin’s arguments makes my brain hurt.

Rubin also kept saying that President Obama had “turned on a dime” about Aghanistan. When the interviewer pressed her, she had to admit that he has not, that he appears to be rethinking his strategy and she fears he might withdraw.

Frankly, I want elected leaders who are willing to think about stuff. We’ve seen what the other kind can do.

Follow this link and search the archives for September 24, 2009, Hour One, or listen here (mp3).

End Addendum

Warning: Language Below

Whoever invented wallpaper should be forced to walk the Earth in eternal unrest until all wallpaper has been removed from all walls.

It was the wrong thing to do morally, but the right thing to do politically. To the extent that the GOP had ACORN to take shots at, ACORN was a distraction.

The Republican Party needs villains to attack, because it has nothing to offer except making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Just look at their track record, for Pete’s sake.

If it cannot find villains, it will make them up, which is what it did with the Voter Fraud Fraud and Acorn.

Of course the Republican Party attacked ACORN. ACORN tries to help poor people, and we can’t have that, now, can we?

Addendum, Later That Evening:

The BooMan describes what it was like to work for ACORN.

Read it.

Why did I get a spam phone call to my cell phone, in Spanish, from an unlisted number in Omaha, Nebraska?

Probably a war dialer.

By the way, I have no problem with Spanish nor with those who speak it; I mention it solely to show that whoever made the call needs some help in basic market research.

Why would anyone imagine that the Republican Party is any more honest, trustworthy, or competent than it was a year ago?

Yeah. I remember where I was.

I remember what happened the whole day.

I remember the scene in the cafeteria, where the television held everyone’s attention.

I remember conversations almost word-for-word.

I remember my co-worker–later my boss and the the next-to-best boss I ever had–saying, “It’s a good thing we have a Texan as president.”

How wrong he was.

To argue that bankruptcy, ruin, and homelessness are legitimate side-effects of seeking medical treatment is absurd.

The leaves on the dogwoods are starting to turn.

Teacher strikes. It’s tradition in southeastern Pennsylvania.

The contract for the 1,070-member (North Penn School District, Montgomery County) union expired Tuesday. Talks broke off Friday afternoon, and no new bargaining had been agreed to as of last night.

Union officials said the school board had made work-rule changes that amounted to a lockout, mainly adding 20 minutes to the elementary-school schedule. The board contended that any work stoppage would be illegal without 48 hours’ notice.

By and large, teachers in this part of the world are paid pretty well. Not great, but okay.

In such circumstances, strikes and threats of strikes usually have more to do with working conditions and with a sense of being generally mistreated by management than with any quantifiable item, though unions will ask for pay or hours changes because you cannot negotiate courtesy.

I worked in a unionized industry for many years. The managers and departments who had “union problems” (grievances, work-to-rule, and stuff like that) were invariably–not usually, invariably–the ones who treated their workers like dirt.

Republican nominee for governor, Bob McDonnell.

I’d like to have a talk with whoever decided that English ivy was a proper ornamental.

There is much gnashing of teeth in Left Blogistan and Left Journalististan because President Obama has been unable to wave a magic wand and get our elected officials incongruously assembled to do his (and their) bidding. Persons are starting to fulminate about a “trust” problem.

Anyone who paid attention during the campaign would know that Mr. Obama is not a doctrinaire (in Republican terms, “wild-eyed”) liberal. He did not campaign as one and has neither portrayed himself as one nor voted as one.

But he does have a “trust” problem.

He trusted that the Republicans would deal in good faith and with truth.

They don’t.

Read more »

Does hurricane Bill mean no hurricane Guillaume?

Aside: The weather system that Bill caused to stall over Delaware dropped 1 1/2″ of rain on my backyard. YMMV.

My father had a Living Will and an Advance Directive. So do I.

He and we were glad he did. The jury’s still out on me.

I sat at my father’s side as he died. I do not have words to express my disgust a the Republican Party’s choosing to twist this type of planning into “euthanasia.”

Nothing they have done since the Terry Schiavo carnival so exposes the venality and hypocrisy of the Republican Party.

The Booman wrote about Gog and Magog last week.

Now comes Andrew Brown in the Guardian. After quoting the relevant passage, a relativerly minor one in Ezekiel, Brown explicates it:

Who are all these people? The best opinion is that like all Bible prophecy, it is a mixture of wish-fulfilment and contemporary (iron age) politics. Some of it at least seems to refer to the turmoil brought about by Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC (unlike Bush, Alexander actually conquered Afghanistan). But they have been for the last two hundred years the subject of increasingly excited evangelical fanfic, especially in America; in the 70s and 80s, Gog was meant to be Russia. Ronald Reagan seems to have believed that.

Ezekiel was prophesying to his countrymen, not ours, 2500 or so years ago.

Anyone who calls himself a Christian, as I do, must accept that Jesus fulfilled the law and the prophesies and that, from that point on, it has been a whole new ballgame.

Playing semantic games with the scriptures–any scriptures, not just Christian scriptures–for contemporary terrestial political gain is the worst kind of pandering.

Afterthought: There is no halfway point for BIblical literalism. If one chooses to be a literalist, one must, at the next wedding one attends, demand to see the proofs of virginity following the consummation of the marriage.

Good luck on that.

Melissa Dribben twits no more. Read the whole thing:

It’s not that the swift, succinct social network has wronged me in any way. My relationship with e-mail has been far more strained. Twitter has never, as far as I know, infected my computer with viruses, slimed my home page with pop-up porn clips, or clogged my family’s cyber-arteries with spam. E-mail has done all of this, plus losing important messages and sending me annoying notes telling me my mailbox is full and to please deal with the problem. (She must use Microsoft Lookout–ed.)

But if e-mail is the exasperating, all-knowing secretary you would love to fire but can’t live without, Twitter is the lightning-fast tattooed bike messenger who never brings a package worth opening.

Rant follows