No, I won't be marrying her. Linda herself has acknowledged that we are very different in our interests and priorities--which doesn't make her a bad person, but makes US a poor combination. The more so, since she has still MORE ailments than I realized at the start, and MY ailments (chiefly high blood pressure) would be aggravated by having full-time responsibility for her welfare. I do, however, find SOME things I can do at times to assist her in her difficulties.
My colleagues in the Colorado Renaissance Festival were told at our first meeting of the season that I was "in a relationship." None of them read this blog. I will, for the time being, NOT be telling them about the "cancellation" between Linda and me. As long as they think I'm still involved with someone, I can enjoy friendly conversations with the women but not be perceived as hitting on them.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Salty Socialism
When I go grocery shopping, I often buy salt-free canned vegetables, in view of my high blood pressure. Salt-free or low-salt foodstuffs have been available for many years, BY THE INITIATIVE of food companies, WITHOUT the government needing to tell them to provide this alternative.
Recently, however, I heard about calls (WHAT a surprise, under the Obama regime) for direct federal oversight of salt content in foods. Big-government advocates are willfully ignoring the fact that there is ALREADY provision being made for those who need to lower their salt intake. And as a caller to a radio program pointed out, forced across-the-board salt reductions would NOT be making provision for persons with severely LOW blood pressure who actually need MORE salt than most of us do.
Count on big government to insist that one size fits all, as well as to insist that no one can do anything constructive unless government is in charge of it.
More recently, I heard Great Britain's Gordon Brown saying something in a debate which didn't make sense at first. Brown was passionately denouncing British conservatives for wanting, as he put it, to take large amounts of money "out of the economy." I knew that British conservatives, like American conservatives, wish to reduce tax burdens, which means common citizens having more money to spend, and money spent by consumers is very much IN the economy. But at last I realized that for Brown, the government and "the economy" ARE ONE AND THE SAME. For this neo-Marxist, money ISN'T in the economy at all, UNLESS it is in the hands of government, or at least having its use tightly controlled by government.
Gordon Brown's notion of what the word "economy" means is akin to our Democratic Party's notion that no one can possibly avoid being overdosed on salt unless government micromanages their diet. It's all part of the relentless push toward putting every last detail of our lives under ironclad supervision.
When you hear leftists talking up the benefits of more and more government control, be sure to take what they say with a grain of salt--if they'll still allow you to HAVE a grain of salt.
Recently, however, I heard about calls (WHAT a surprise, under the Obama regime) for direct federal oversight of salt content in foods. Big-government advocates are willfully ignoring the fact that there is ALREADY provision being made for those who need to lower their salt intake. And as a caller to a radio program pointed out, forced across-the-board salt reductions would NOT be making provision for persons with severely LOW blood pressure who actually need MORE salt than most of us do.
Count on big government to insist that one size fits all, as well as to insist that no one can do anything constructive unless government is in charge of it.
More recently, I heard Great Britain's Gordon Brown saying something in a debate which didn't make sense at first. Brown was passionately denouncing British conservatives for wanting, as he put it, to take large amounts of money "out of the economy." I knew that British conservatives, like American conservatives, wish to reduce tax burdens, which means common citizens having more money to spend, and money spent by consumers is very much IN the economy. But at last I realized that for Brown, the government and "the economy" ARE ONE AND THE SAME. For this neo-Marxist, money ISN'T in the economy at all, UNLESS it is in the hands of government, or at least having its use tightly controlled by government.
Gordon Brown's notion of what the word "economy" means is akin to our Democratic Party's notion that no one can possibly avoid being overdosed on salt unless government micromanages their diet. It's all part of the relentless push toward putting every last detail of our lives under ironclad supervision.
When you hear leftists talking up the benefits of more and more government control, be sure to take what they say with a grain of salt--if they'll still allow you to HAVE a grain of salt.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Almost at the Two-Year Mark
This coming Friday will be the second anniversary of Janalee's arrival in Heaven. Earlier this month was the thirty-first anniversary of my wedding to my FIRST deceased wife, Mary.
A woman named Linda, who knew Mary and me long ago, has reappeared in my life. She has a load of health problems, most of which are not at all of her own making; much of her trouble has been caused by the sinful negligence of healthcare providers. I am praying for God's clear guidance as to whether Linda is meant to be my third wife; God knows, I have experience in caring for ailing women.
A woman named Linda, who knew Mary and me long ago, has reappeared in my life. She has a load of health problems, most of which are not at all of her own making; much of her trouble has been caused by the sinful negligence of healthcare providers. I am praying for God's clear guidance as to whether Linda is meant to be my third wife; God knows, I have experience in caring for ailing women.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Fighting Apathy
This weblog has lain idle for a long time: for most of the period since Janalee went Further Up and Further In. I myself have not been entirely idle; for one thing, I have performed in a Renaissance Festival--though if it had been up to me, I would have forgone the festival and had Janalee healed. Anyway, here is my latest "Empowered For Freedom" article....
I'M NOT A JUROR, BUT I SEE FALSE WITNESSES
Aurora, Colorado, March 9, 2010: Imagine two things with me, please. Neither of them is that there's no Heaven.
First, imagine that someone says to you, "There's a right, and there's a wrong, and there's a God Who knows the difference." If you have the sense to know it, America's Founding Fathers, and all the saints of the Bible, would have heartily agreed with this plain statement. Even many agnostics would agree on the first part.
Second, imagine that you have written a book, and that you prepare a summary of its contents as a way to get readers interested. You have complete control of what goes into this summary, so that if it fails to be truly representative of the message of your book, this failure is no one's fault but your own.
Okay, hold those two thoughts, while we travel back in time to last spring--by chance, precisely to Cinco de Mayo of 2009, which has no bearing on this article. That just happened to be the day on which I was one of a crowd of summoned people at the Aurora courthouse, waiting to find out which of us would be selected for jury duty. On the waiting-room TV set was the left-wing talk show "The View;" this day they were discussing the issue of whether any Christian ideas can ever be mentioned in public schools, and likewise whether it's okay to speak definitely _against_ faith in public schools.
Joy Behar said something which, taken in isolation, was true and right, even laudable: "The solution to bad speech is not to silence speech; the solution to bad speech is good speech." This statement, applied with anything resembling honesty, would cut the legs out from under all movements to censor the media under the lying pretense of "protecting us from hate." Unfortunately, Ms. Behar was not clear, in this instance, about _which_ speech in school she regarded as the bad speech: a Christian student's expression of belief, or someone else attacking that belief. So I had to suspend forming any strong opinion about Ms. Behar; but I kept it in mind that someone on the left had admitted in principle that truth should be able to refute falsehood _without_ cheating by resorting to forcible censorship.
The year of hope and change proceeded. In July, getting less public attention than the healthcare issue, Senate majority leader Harry Reid was relentlessly promoting the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act. This bill was labelled with intentional and cynical dishonesty, reflecting the lies which had been circulated at the time of Matthew Shepard's murder. The young gay man's death had been loudly blamed on "Christian bigotry;" but in actual fact, the murderers had not been Christians at all, just ordinary thuggish goons. The hard-left media had as usual been selective in their outrage; another homosexual was murdered in the East around the same time as Shepard, but the killers in that case were black, and so that murder was not widely reported. The media establishment would not allow any nonwhites to be seen as bigots (unless the nonwhites were Christians). Reid knew perfectly well that his hate-crime legislation would not add _anything_ to the prevention of murders, because, well DUH, murder already was illegal. The real purpose, just as with the also-falsely-labelled Fairness Doctrine, was to silence Christians and moral conservatives.
Talkers and writers on the left were never worried about the censorship campaign, because they knew it was not aimed against them. It was around this time that an atheistic writer named Joel Grus was promoting his book, Your Religion Is False, which was aimed at "proving" that every sort of belief in the supernatural, with no exceptions, is not only mistaken, but ridiculous. Now, do you remember the second of the thoughts you were holding? That one comes in here. Joel Grus published online a summary of his book; here, he had complete power to present the parts he wanted to present, complete power to make his summary accurate and reflective of his intent. He wasted no time getting into his mockery, which he doubtless regarded as "fair" because he insulted ALL faiths (except his own humanist creed). The following is from the very beginning of his summary:
...you are probably familiar with religion, although –- depending on your circumstances -– you may know it as "why daddy is required to hit me with a brass fireplace poker when I fail to show him proper amounts of respect," or "those expensive skin-galvanometer sessions I submit to in order to further my show-business career," or "the reason the beautiful, beautiful act of a man making love to another man is in fact ‘an abomination.’ “
You can see a powerful hint of his self-serving motives here. He would call anyone who raised ANY objection to his apparent preference a "hatemonger;" but his concern about hate speech only runs in one direction; HE still is allowed to hate as he pleases. And, as if this were accomplishing anything to prove his points true, he had the cover of his book illustrated with a cartoonist's distortion of a famous painting of Jesus taken from the Cross. This is what C.S. Lewis would call Flippancy: acting AS IF you had already proven your opponents wrong, even if you haven't.
Grus' flippancy continues throughout his lengthy summary, seemingly preaching to the anti-choir, counting on a favorable response from cynics like himself who already _want_ God to be non-existent, and so will gladly treat a shallow joke as if it were an awesome intellectual proof, provided it "proves" what they wanted to believe anyway. Here's another bit:
Most of the religions we will show false involve some sort of “god,” a magical being who lives on a cloud in the sky and throws lightning bolts at his enemies and watches you while you’re showering.
You get the idea: by refusing a priori to allow for any possibility of a transcendent moral authority and source of life, he can _pretend_ that faith was proven false at some point in time, use ridicule as a substitute for organized reasoning, and proceed to his victory celebration without having fought the battle.
A weblog visitor challenged the caustic assertions Grus was making; and with a true leftist's faith in the all-purpose "You took me out of context!" defense, Grus raged at his challenger for forming an inaccurate impression due to not having read the whole book yet. But Grus had had every opportunity to make his excerpts truly indicative of the book's content; if anyone took him out of context, he took _himself_ out of context. Grus, in fact, was merely practicing the leftist double standard, giving himself license to say anything about anyone, but acting like a poor wounded victim if anyone talked back. I myself encounter this all the time, and I do mean ALL the time.
Of course, Joel Grus was only one of a legion of hard leftists who knew perfectly well that hate-crimes legislation would never be invoked to censor _their_ hatred. An editorialist for my own local newspaper, the Aurora Sentinel, expected to be taken seriously when he claimed that protestors against the Marxist takeover of all health care were terrorists. This man doubtless would have gone ballistic if anyone had called the war protestors of the Sixties terrorists--yet it was _their_ movement that generated riots, and even acts of targetted violence which really did qualify as terrorism, _unlike_ the Tea Party rallies now held by law-abiding citizens INCLUDING ME.
(The Associated Press, meanwhile, was shamelessly making partisan use of loaded language in supposedly objective reporting of the healthcare debate: calling members of Congress "recalcitrant" if they didn't blindly follow the Democrat Messiah in his campaign to federalize every last aspirin tablet.)
Now it's time to bring forward the first thought I asked you to hold: the thought of someone saying, "There's a right, and there's a wrong, and there's a God Who knows the difference."
The revisionist cable-TV series of "Battlestar Galactica" already made it the murderous Cylons who talked about believing in a single God instead of the multiple gods the humans believed in. But now, in 2010, we have the spin-off prequel series "Caprica" making the earlier God-bashing seem subtle by comparison. In "Caprica," those words about right, wrong and God were spoken by a _human_ character....who was recruiting for a _terrorist_ force called "Soldiers of the One." So it isn't just the Cylons; the writers ruthlessly insist that _anyone_ believing in a single Supreme Being is, by that very fact, a dangerously warped lunatic. That's right, Mother Teresa was no different from Osama bin-Laden. And the _only_ really happy and functional household I've seen depicted in "Caprica" is a bisexual group-marriage commune; so even the _temporal_ norms associated with the Biblical God are to be scorned as inferior if not outright harmful.
The directors and writers working for the SyFy Channel have no fear at all that "hate speech" rules will be invoked against them for any of this; they, too, know that the censorship movement is intentionally selective.
Hard-core leftists, if seeing this column, are likely to miss the point on purpose, and to try to dismiss me by saying, "Conservatives criticize liberals as often as liberals criticize conservatives, so quit complaining." If they say this, they will be proving themselves (depending on the individual) either ignorant or deliberately dishonest. When we conservatives criticize liberals, we are NOT simultaneously working through the judicial and legislative processes to gag and censor our opponents with the force of law. The liberals ARE trying to gag and censor us--as witness brat-actor Sean Penn saying that reporters should face legal penalties for calling Venezuela's Hugo Chavez the socialistic dictator he is. I'm not aware of Mr. Penn ever getting on the case of Democrats who yelled "Bush is Hitler!" (Not idealizing Bush, but he WAS on the receiving end of this double standard.)
I eventually found an answer to the question of whether Joy Behar is fair and impartial. She showed her true colors when Rush Limbaugh got to be a judge at the 2010 Miss America pageant. When Mr. Limbaugh was introduced, and was loudly applauded, Ms. Behar insisted that he was being booed by the audience. She may have had pals seated near her who did boo, but they were a tiny minority at most; nonetheless, she _wanted_ it to be true that Mr. Limbaugh was being rejected and repudiated. My Tea Party friends need to understand that my bringing up Mr. Limbaugh does NOT mean that I regard him as meeting all our standards; but understand further that for someone like Ms. Behar, anyone even _slightly_ aligned with true moral conservatism is an enemy to be smeared, the way Carrie Prejean got smeared last year. What Ms. Behar did to attack Mr. Limbaugh's reputation, she would just as enthusiastically do to any more genuine conservative you care to name.
The previous could have been an adequate wrap-up for my return to real column writing; but there's always more. Just the other day, at a Big Lots store selling books, I encountered a novel whose motivation is again explainable in terms we were given by C.S. Lewis. In the same book where he discussed flippancy, Mr. Lewis pointed out that people tend to guard against imaginary dangers while ignoring the real ones; he called this "rushing about with fire extinguishers when there is a flood, and crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under."
The novel, A Pagan's Nightmare by Ray Blackston, depicts on its cover the Christian fish symbol altered into the likeness of the menacing shark from "Jaws." Blackston portrays a worldwide Christian dictatorship, in which non-Christians are treated as badly or worse than black Africans were treated under apartheid. If this author has ever lived on the surface of the Earth, on an inhabited continent, he _knows_ that right now there are plenty of groups and factions far more likely to create such a dictatorship than modern Christians are; but he feels free to slander us, precisely because he _also_ knows (however much he pretends to be afraid of the "menace"we represent) that we _won't_ issue fatwas calling for his death. In other words, Christian-bashing is a cheap and easy way to flatter yourself that you're "taking a daring stand" when you know you're not really being the least bit brave.
Some people not at all friendly to Ray Blackston, or to Sean Penn, or to Joel Grus, or to Joy Behar, are gleefully taking advantage of the political correctness which focusses on gagging Christians and patriotic Americans. I know from direct dialogue with fundamentalist Muslims that they claim the right to have territory (notably Mecca) reserved for Islam alone; but they don't want anyone _else_ to come even close to having the same right. Thus, when the Mayor of Lancaster, California said in January that his town was "a Christian community," the pro-jihadist organization C.A.I.R. jumped on him furiously, pretending to believe that this was "hate speech." Of course they would be just as furious in their denials if _they_ were accused of hate speech for their _more_ aggressive statements about "a Muslim cantonment."
So the race is on between two forces of tyrannical censorship which are not really compatible with each other, but which are briefly allied because they both want to shut up the testimony of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. Sports fans, place your bets: will America's domestic neo-Marxists be first to make open Christian witness illegal as "hate speech," or will imported Islamists pull ahead on the turn and make open Christian witness illegal as "Islamophobia"?
Praying for America,
Joseph Richard Ravitts
Ut fidem praestem in difficultate!
I'M NOT A JUROR, BUT I SEE FALSE WITNESSES
Aurora, Colorado, March 9, 2010: Imagine two things with me, please. Neither of them is that there's no Heaven.
First, imagine that someone says to you, "There's a right, and there's a wrong, and there's a God Who knows the difference." If you have the sense to know it, America's Founding Fathers, and all the saints of the Bible, would have heartily agreed with this plain statement. Even many agnostics would agree on the first part.
Second, imagine that you have written a book, and that you prepare a summary of its contents as a way to get readers interested. You have complete control of what goes into this summary, so that if it fails to be truly representative of the message of your book, this failure is no one's fault but your own.
Okay, hold those two thoughts, while we travel back in time to last spring--by chance, precisely to Cinco de Mayo of 2009, which has no bearing on this article. That just happened to be the day on which I was one of a crowd of summoned people at the Aurora courthouse, waiting to find out which of us would be selected for jury duty. On the waiting-room TV set was the left-wing talk show "The View;" this day they were discussing the issue of whether any Christian ideas can ever be mentioned in public schools, and likewise whether it's okay to speak definitely _against_ faith in public schools.
Joy Behar said something which, taken in isolation, was true and right, even laudable: "The solution to bad speech is not to silence speech; the solution to bad speech is good speech." This statement, applied with anything resembling honesty, would cut the legs out from under all movements to censor the media under the lying pretense of "protecting us from hate." Unfortunately, Ms. Behar was not clear, in this instance, about _which_ speech in school she regarded as the bad speech: a Christian student's expression of belief, or someone else attacking that belief. So I had to suspend forming any strong opinion about Ms. Behar; but I kept it in mind that someone on the left had admitted in principle that truth should be able to refute falsehood _without_ cheating by resorting to forcible censorship.
The year of hope and change proceeded. In July, getting less public attention than the healthcare issue, Senate majority leader Harry Reid was relentlessly promoting the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act. This bill was labelled with intentional and cynical dishonesty, reflecting the lies which had been circulated at the time of Matthew Shepard's murder. The young gay man's death had been loudly blamed on "Christian bigotry;" but in actual fact, the murderers had not been Christians at all, just ordinary thuggish goons. The hard-left media had as usual been selective in their outrage; another homosexual was murdered in the East around the same time as Shepard, but the killers in that case were black, and so that murder was not widely reported. The media establishment would not allow any nonwhites to be seen as bigots (unless the nonwhites were Christians). Reid knew perfectly well that his hate-crime legislation would not add _anything_ to the prevention of murders, because, well DUH, murder already was illegal. The real purpose, just as with the also-falsely-labelled Fairness Doctrine, was to silence Christians and moral conservatives.
Talkers and writers on the left were never worried about the censorship campaign, because they knew it was not aimed against them. It was around this time that an atheistic writer named Joel Grus was promoting his book, Your Religion Is False, which was aimed at "proving" that every sort of belief in the supernatural, with no exceptions, is not only mistaken, but ridiculous. Now, do you remember the second of the thoughts you were holding? That one comes in here. Joel Grus published online a summary of his book; here, he had complete power to present the parts he wanted to present, complete power to make his summary accurate and reflective of his intent. He wasted no time getting into his mockery, which he doubtless regarded as "fair" because he insulted ALL faiths (except his own humanist creed). The following is from the very beginning of his summary:
...you are probably familiar with religion, although –- depending on your circumstances -– you may know it as "why daddy is required to hit me with a brass fireplace poker when I fail to show him proper amounts of respect," or "those expensive skin-galvanometer sessions I submit to in order to further my show-business career," or "the reason the beautiful, beautiful act of a man making love to another man is in fact ‘an abomination.’ “
You can see a powerful hint of his self-serving motives here. He would call anyone who raised ANY objection to his apparent preference a "hatemonger;" but his concern about hate speech only runs in one direction; HE still is allowed to hate as he pleases. And, as if this were accomplishing anything to prove his points true, he had the cover of his book illustrated with a cartoonist's distortion of a famous painting of Jesus taken from the Cross. This is what C.S. Lewis would call Flippancy: acting AS IF you had already proven your opponents wrong, even if you haven't.
Grus' flippancy continues throughout his lengthy summary, seemingly preaching to the anti-choir, counting on a favorable response from cynics like himself who already _want_ God to be non-existent, and so will gladly treat a shallow joke as if it were an awesome intellectual proof, provided it "proves" what they wanted to believe anyway. Here's another bit:
Most of the religions we will show false involve some sort of “god,” a magical being who lives on a cloud in the sky and throws lightning bolts at his enemies and watches you while you’re showering.
You get the idea: by refusing a priori to allow for any possibility of a transcendent moral authority and source of life, he can _pretend_ that faith was proven false at some point in time, use ridicule as a substitute for organized reasoning, and proceed to his victory celebration without having fought the battle.
A weblog visitor challenged the caustic assertions Grus was making; and with a true leftist's faith in the all-purpose "You took me out of context!" defense, Grus raged at his challenger for forming an inaccurate impression due to not having read the whole book yet. But Grus had had every opportunity to make his excerpts truly indicative of the book's content; if anyone took him out of context, he took _himself_ out of context. Grus, in fact, was merely practicing the leftist double standard, giving himself license to say anything about anyone, but acting like a poor wounded victim if anyone talked back. I myself encounter this all the time, and I do mean ALL the time.
Of course, Joel Grus was only one of a legion of hard leftists who knew perfectly well that hate-crimes legislation would never be invoked to censor _their_ hatred. An editorialist for my own local newspaper, the Aurora Sentinel, expected to be taken seriously when he claimed that protestors against the Marxist takeover of all health care were terrorists. This man doubtless would have gone ballistic if anyone had called the war protestors of the Sixties terrorists--yet it was _their_ movement that generated riots, and even acts of targetted violence which really did qualify as terrorism, _unlike_ the Tea Party rallies now held by law-abiding citizens INCLUDING ME.
(The Associated Press, meanwhile, was shamelessly making partisan use of loaded language in supposedly objective reporting of the healthcare debate: calling members of Congress "recalcitrant" if they didn't blindly follow the Democrat Messiah in his campaign to federalize every last aspirin tablet.)
Now it's time to bring forward the first thought I asked you to hold: the thought of someone saying, "There's a right, and there's a wrong, and there's a God Who knows the difference."
The revisionist cable-TV series of "Battlestar Galactica" already made it the murderous Cylons who talked about believing in a single God instead of the multiple gods the humans believed in. But now, in 2010, we have the spin-off prequel series "Caprica" making the earlier God-bashing seem subtle by comparison. In "Caprica," those words about right, wrong and God were spoken by a _human_ character....who was recruiting for a _terrorist_ force called "Soldiers of the One." So it isn't just the Cylons; the writers ruthlessly insist that _anyone_ believing in a single Supreme Being is, by that very fact, a dangerously warped lunatic. That's right, Mother Teresa was no different from Osama bin-Laden. And the _only_ really happy and functional household I've seen depicted in "Caprica" is a bisexual group-marriage commune; so even the _temporal_ norms associated with the Biblical God are to be scorned as inferior if not outright harmful.
The directors and writers working for the SyFy Channel have no fear at all that "hate speech" rules will be invoked against them for any of this; they, too, know that the censorship movement is intentionally selective.
Hard-core leftists, if seeing this column, are likely to miss the point on purpose, and to try to dismiss me by saying, "Conservatives criticize liberals as often as liberals criticize conservatives, so quit complaining." If they say this, they will be proving themselves (depending on the individual) either ignorant or deliberately dishonest. When we conservatives criticize liberals, we are NOT simultaneously working through the judicial and legislative processes to gag and censor our opponents with the force of law. The liberals ARE trying to gag and censor us--as witness brat-actor Sean Penn saying that reporters should face legal penalties for calling Venezuela's Hugo Chavez the socialistic dictator he is. I'm not aware of Mr. Penn ever getting on the case of Democrats who yelled "Bush is Hitler!" (Not idealizing Bush, but he WAS on the receiving end of this double standard.)
I eventually found an answer to the question of whether Joy Behar is fair and impartial. She showed her true colors when Rush Limbaugh got to be a judge at the 2010 Miss America pageant. When Mr. Limbaugh was introduced, and was loudly applauded, Ms. Behar insisted that he was being booed by the audience. She may have had pals seated near her who did boo, but they were a tiny minority at most; nonetheless, she _wanted_ it to be true that Mr. Limbaugh was being rejected and repudiated. My Tea Party friends need to understand that my bringing up Mr. Limbaugh does NOT mean that I regard him as meeting all our standards; but understand further that for someone like Ms. Behar, anyone even _slightly_ aligned with true moral conservatism is an enemy to be smeared, the way Carrie Prejean got smeared last year. What Ms. Behar did to attack Mr. Limbaugh's reputation, she would just as enthusiastically do to any more genuine conservative you care to name.
The previous could have been an adequate wrap-up for my return to real column writing; but there's always more. Just the other day, at a Big Lots store selling books, I encountered a novel whose motivation is again explainable in terms we were given by C.S. Lewis. In the same book where he discussed flippancy, Mr. Lewis pointed out that people tend to guard against imaginary dangers while ignoring the real ones; he called this "rushing about with fire extinguishers when there is a flood, and crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under."
The novel, A Pagan's Nightmare by Ray Blackston, depicts on its cover the Christian fish symbol altered into the likeness of the menacing shark from "Jaws." Blackston portrays a worldwide Christian dictatorship, in which non-Christians are treated as badly or worse than black Africans were treated under apartheid. If this author has ever lived on the surface of the Earth, on an inhabited continent, he _knows_ that right now there are plenty of groups and factions far more likely to create such a dictatorship than modern Christians are; but he feels free to slander us, precisely because he _also_ knows (however much he pretends to be afraid of the "menace"we represent) that we _won't_ issue fatwas calling for his death. In other words, Christian-bashing is a cheap and easy way to flatter yourself that you're "taking a daring stand" when you know you're not really being the least bit brave.
Some people not at all friendly to Ray Blackston, or to Sean Penn, or to Joel Grus, or to Joy Behar, are gleefully taking advantage of the political correctness which focusses on gagging Christians and patriotic Americans. I know from direct dialogue with fundamentalist Muslims that they claim the right to have territory (notably Mecca) reserved for Islam alone; but they don't want anyone _else_ to come even close to having the same right. Thus, when the Mayor of Lancaster, California said in January that his town was "a Christian community," the pro-jihadist organization C.A.I.R. jumped on him furiously, pretending to believe that this was "hate speech." Of course they would be just as furious in their denials if _they_ were accused of hate speech for their _more_ aggressive statements about "a Muslim cantonment."
So the race is on between two forces of tyrannical censorship which are not really compatible with each other, but which are briefly allied because they both want to shut up the testimony of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. Sports fans, place your bets: will America's domestic neo-Marxists be first to make open Christian witness illegal as "hate speech," or will imported Islamists pull ahead on the turn and make open Christian witness illegal as "Islamophobia"?
Praying for America,
Joseph Richard Ravitts
Ut fidem praestem in difficultate!
Monday, November 3, 2008
Happy Birthday, Janalee; You're Well Out Of This Mess!
My wife Janalee, now residing up in Heaven, doesn't have to endure being treated like an evil space alien because she _didn't_ get an abortion when she was raped as a teenager. But all of the physicians who tried to help her during her long struggle against disability are close to being treated like evil space aliens if _they_ refuse to _perform_ abortions.
When my _first_ wife Mary--also now in Heaven--was with me in Japan, she learned that Japan _requires_ abortion on demand; any Japanese doctor who refuses to kill babies loses his license. That's coming here in America, if the Lord High Savior Barack Obama wins this election.
Just to be clear, I'm talking about the same Lord High Obama who makes the pitch about "spreading the wealth around"...but whose _actual_ degree of spreading HIS OWN wealth around has been documented on Paul Caron's "TaxProf Blog" as follows.
Here is a summary of the figures:
0.5 percent in 2001.
0.4 percent in 2002.
1.4 percent in 2003.
1.2 percent in 2004.
4.7 percent in 2005.
And 6.1 percent, whoop-dee-do, in 2006.
Paul Caron writes: "What is surprising, given the recent controversy over Obama's membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ, is how little the Obamas apparently gave to charity -- well short of the biblical 10% tithe for all seven years. In two of the years, the Obamas gave far less than 1% of their income to charity; in three of the years, they gave around 1% of their income to charity. Only in the last two years have they given substantially more as their income skyrocketed -- 4.7% in 2005 and 6.1% in 2006. (Of course, it is possible that the Obamas may have made gifts to other worthy causes that were not deductible for federal income tax purposes.)"
I (Joseph Ravitts) can state as a concrete fact that I, a military retiree, give away a higher percentage of my annual income than the oh-so-compassionate Lord High Obama does, including "gifts to other worthy causes that were not deductible for federal income tax purposes." That's because my idea of compassion _doesn't_ mean forcibly taking away _your_ money to pay off my voting base. But I confess that I didn't give to one cause which Obama has heavily supported with his own money: the ACORN organization, which is dedicated to falsifying election results in his favor.
If enough real and fictional voters are swayed by the mindless mantra of "Change!" to put Obama in the White House, he'll get the chance to prove what he means by "Freedom Of Choice." He means just what the "pro-choice" movement has ALWAYS
meant by its double-talk: "freedom" in ONLY ONE DIRECTION, always and everywhere FOR abortion, and too bloody bad for anyone who has a conscience.
But that's okay, dear Change Zombies, because you won't have to listen to the voices of morality objecting. The Lord High Obama is also an advocate of the Fairness Doctrine--"fairness" having of course the same one-way meaning as "choice." It isn't enough in the great Obama's eyes that the hardcore left in America already has ALL the major broadcast television networks, ALL the country's biggest newspapers, ALL the slickest movie and music-video stars, and other media resources besides, totally and one-sidedly on its team. Any and every communications outlet that conservatives do still have must be diminished and restricted, until we have one-party airwaves to match a one-party government.
To doctors who DO remember the Hippocratic Oath...and to radio station owners who naively think they have the right (under the same First Amendment which leftists appeal to when it suits them) to run the programs _they_ prefer...and to "bitter Americans" who are so primitive as to believe they should be allowed to defend themselves against criminal assault inside their own homes...and to Christians who _don't_ think marriage needs to be redefined as "any sleeping arrangement anybody likes" ...and to our military personnel to whom Obama has said that military service warps their personalities...I say, I'll be praying for you, praying for us all.
And Janalee, I trust you'll be praying for us from up there.
JOSEPH RICHARD RAVITTS
Ut fidem praestem in difficultate!
When my _first_ wife Mary--also now in Heaven--was with me in Japan, she learned that Japan _requires_ abortion on demand; any Japanese doctor who refuses to kill babies loses his license. That's coming here in America, if the Lord High Savior Barack Obama wins this election.
Just to be clear, I'm talking about the same Lord High Obama who makes the pitch about "spreading the wealth around"...but whose _actual_ degree of spreading HIS OWN wealth around has been documented on Paul Caron's "TaxProf Blog" as follows.
Here is a summary of the figures:
0.5 percent in 2001.
0.4 percent in 2002.
1.4 percent in 2003.
1.2 percent in 2004.
4.7 percent in 2005.
And 6.1 percent, whoop-dee-do, in 2006.
Paul Caron writes: "What is surprising, given the recent controversy over Obama's membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ, is how little the Obamas apparently gave to charity -- well short of the biblical 10% tithe for all seven years. In two of the years, the Obamas gave far less than 1% of their income to charity; in three of the years, they gave around 1% of their income to charity. Only in the last two years have they given substantially more as their income skyrocketed -- 4.7% in 2005 and 6.1% in 2006. (Of course, it is possible that the Obamas may have made gifts to other worthy causes that were not deductible for federal income tax purposes.)"
I (Joseph Ravitts) can state as a concrete fact that I, a military retiree, give away a higher percentage of my annual income than the oh-so-compassionate Lord High Obama does, including "gifts to other worthy causes that were not deductible for federal income tax purposes." That's because my idea of compassion _doesn't_ mean forcibly taking away _your_ money to pay off my voting base. But I confess that I didn't give to one cause which Obama has heavily supported with his own money: the ACORN organization, which is dedicated to falsifying election results in his favor.
If enough real and fictional voters are swayed by the mindless mantra of "Change!" to put Obama in the White House, he'll get the chance to prove what he means by "Freedom Of Choice." He means just what the "pro-choice" movement has ALWAYS
meant by its double-talk: "freedom" in ONLY ONE DIRECTION, always and everywhere FOR abortion, and too bloody bad for anyone who has a conscience.
But that's okay, dear Change Zombies, because you won't have to listen to the voices of morality objecting. The Lord High Obama is also an advocate of the Fairness Doctrine--"fairness" having of course the same one-way meaning as "choice." It isn't enough in the great Obama's eyes that the hardcore left in America already has ALL the major broadcast television networks, ALL the country's biggest newspapers, ALL the slickest movie and music-video stars, and other media resources besides, totally and one-sidedly on its team. Any and every communications outlet that conservatives do still have must be diminished and restricted, until we have one-party airwaves to match a one-party government.
To doctors who DO remember the Hippocratic Oath...and to radio station owners who naively think they have the right (under the same First Amendment which leftists appeal to when it suits them) to run the programs _they_ prefer...and to "bitter Americans" who are so primitive as to believe they should be allowed to defend themselves against criminal assault inside their own homes...and to Christians who _don't_ think marriage needs to be redefined as "any sleeping arrangement anybody likes" ...and to our military personnel to whom Obama has said that military service warps their personalities...I say, I'll be praying for you, praying for us all.
And Janalee, I trust you'll be praying for us from up there.
JOSEPH RICHARD RAVITTS
Ut fidem praestem in difficultate!
Saturday, August 23, 2008
A Not-At-All-Pleasant Greeting From Hallmark
I have often had cause to think about what evils my Janalee may have been spared from by being called away to Heaven so early and quickly. I was mostly thinking in
terms of horrible disasters and plagues in which Jan might have died slowly and painfully. But one thing I _didn't_ foresee for her to be _spared_ from was the
poisoning, the defiling, of something that she cherished.
I mean the Hallmark Corporation, whose cable-TV channel provided my darling "penguin" with hours of enjoyment in the form of Michael Landon's "Little House on the Prairie" program, and Michael Landon Junior's adaptations of Janette Oke novels. It would not surprise me if I could find out that Jan has by now gotten the elder Landon's autograph up there. But Hallmark is now getting its hall all marked up, with a mark alien to the Ingalls family.
Today I learned that, in its original sector, Hallmark is now selling....HOMOSEXUAL WEDDING CARDS.
I had already smelled a rat when I saw the Hallmark Channel give huge publicity to a TV movie featuring the fanatically anti-American, anti-Christian, pro-Communist and pro-terrorist Vanessa Redgrave. But this move with card merchandising still caught me by surprise.
How long will it be now before the cable-TV outlet is instructed by corporate HQ to start conforming to the philosophy reflected in the new cards, that homosexuality
is completely normal? Will my Jan, and Mr. Landon Senior, have to turn their eyes away from Earth, as the Hallmark Channel premieres a new "family" series called "Little Gay Bathhouse on the Prairie"? Actually, the mortal viewers down here may scarcely even notice, with all the gay-matchmaking programs _already_ airing on basic cable.
Even before Hallmark sold out to the sodomizing tail that wants to wag the national dog, a local newspaper here in Colorado had shown its loyalties by going out of its way to spotlight a gay-male couple when it wanted to do an article on choices in home decoration. And the McDonald's chain has adopted the so-called "Out & Equal" program to advertise homosexuality. Their defenders pretend that this is "only" a matter of allowing suppliers owned by gays to do business with the restaurant chain; but this is a transparent LIE, since there is nothing that would stop McDonald's from going ahead and buying beef and potatoes from gay suppliers _without_ specially trumpeting the glories of homosexuality as such _while_ buying the groceries.
It probably is not too soon to start betting pools about which other "alternative lifestyle" will be _next_ in line to demand that society declare it normal, complete with its own Hallmark cards. I hear that incest is getting a boost, with Julianne Moore starring in a movie about a mother having sex with her son. But don't count polygamy out of the race, what with Muslim audiences increasing in numbers. Maybe necrophiliacs can derive some leverage out of the current fad for vampire novels. And, I'm sorry to say, the beloved British TV series "Doctor Who" has not only started featuring gay characters, but also did a story in which we were told that an Earth woman had been able to bear a child to a space alien who was not at all humanoid in his true physical form; whether intended by the BBC writers or not, this episode might be grabbed onto by proponents of bestiality.
I invite _anyone_ to give me a convincing reason why I should _not_ expect ALL these "variations" to demand public respectability as loudly and petulantly as homosexuality has demanded it.
Are those crickets I hear chirping in the silence? Will someone please tell Chuck Norris what they're doing to the company that's been airing his pro-Christian "Walker, Texas Ranger" series?
JOSEPH R. RAVITTS
terms of horrible disasters and plagues in which Jan might have died slowly and painfully. But one thing I _didn't_ foresee for her to be _spared_ from was the
poisoning, the defiling, of something that she cherished.
I mean the Hallmark Corporation, whose cable-TV channel provided my darling "penguin" with hours of enjoyment in the form of Michael Landon's "Little House on the Prairie" program, and Michael Landon Junior's adaptations of Janette Oke novels. It would not surprise me if I could find out that Jan has by now gotten the elder Landon's autograph up there. But Hallmark is now getting its hall all marked up, with a mark alien to the Ingalls family.
Today I learned that, in its original sector, Hallmark is now selling....HOMOSEXUAL WEDDING CARDS.
I had already smelled a rat when I saw the Hallmark Channel give huge publicity to a TV movie featuring the fanatically anti-American, anti-Christian, pro-Communist and pro-terrorist Vanessa Redgrave. But this move with card merchandising still caught me by surprise.
How long will it be now before the cable-TV outlet is instructed by corporate HQ to start conforming to the philosophy reflected in the new cards, that homosexuality
is completely normal? Will my Jan, and Mr. Landon Senior, have to turn their eyes away from Earth, as the Hallmark Channel premieres a new "family" series called "Little Gay Bathhouse on the Prairie"? Actually, the mortal viewers down here may scarcely even notice, with all the gay-matchmaking programs _already_ airing on basic cable.
Even before Hallmark sold out to the sodomizing tail that wants to wag the national dog, a local newspaper here in Colorado had shown its loyalties by going out of its way to spotlight a gay-male couple when it wanted to do an article on choices in home decoration. And the McDonald's chain has adopted the so-called "Out & Equal" program to advertise homosexuality. Their defenders pretend that this is "only" a matter of allowing suppliers owned by gays to do business with the restaurant chain; but this is a transparent LIE, since there is nothing that would stop McDonald's from going ahead and buying beef and potatoes from gay suppliers _without_ specially trumpeting the glories of homosexuality as such _while_ buying the groceries.
It probably is not too soon to start betting pools about which other "alternative lifestyle" will be _next_ in line to demand that society declare it normal, complete with its own Hallmark cards. I hear that incest is getting a boost, with Julianne Moore starring in a movie about a mother having sex with her son. But don't count polygamy out of the race, what with Muslim audiences increasing in numbers. Maybe necrophiliacs can derive some leverage out of the current fad for vampire novels. And, I'm sorry to say, the beloved British TV series "Doctor Who" has not only started featuring gay characters, but also did a story in which we were told that an Earth woman had been able to bear a child to a space alien who was not at all humanoid in his true physical form; whether intended by the BBC writers or not, this episode might be grabbed onto by proponents of bestiality.
I invite _anyone_ to give me a convincing reason why I should _not_ expect ALL these "variations" to demand public respectability as loudly and petulantly as homosexuality has demanded it.
Are those crickets I hear chirping in the silence? Will someone please tell Chuck Norris what they're doing to the company that's been airing his pro-Christian "Walker, Texas Ranger" series?
JOSEPH R. RAVITTS
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Playing House And Playing Victim
Written on the third anniversary of the day when I proposed marriage to my Janalee, who now has a Heavenly mansion to dwell in--close to my first wife's mansion, there in the Kingdom where there is no rivalry or jealousy.
Long ago, around the time I got married to my Mary, there was a vacant house across the street from the formerly-vacant house we were homesteading under a city program. The owner of this unused house was hoping to rent it to someone. What he got was fifty percent of what he was looking for: that is, he got all of the burden and none of the reward. What happened was that a homeless family literally BROKE INTO the house, just like burglars, and began helping themselves not only to shelter, but also to heat, light and water that were being paid for by the owner.
The owner of the house hated to turn poor people out on the street, so he WENT ON paying for these utilities, which he could have cut off--much as the government of Israel in recent times has shown mercy to the very Palestinians who shoot rockets at them from Gaza, by NOT instantly cutting off their electrical power supply. The house owner, however, was so evil and mercenary and wicked and inhuman as to ask if the thieves using his property might consider paying him rent.
When months had passed with no rent forthcoming from the thieves, the owner of the property finally decided that he had given them a free ride at his own unrewarded expense long enough. So he called on the police to evict the long-term burglars. That's when the real fun started.
The liberal establishment in our city immediately erupted in furious outrage against this EEEEEE-vil, GREEEEE-dy landlord who had so cruelly turned out his poor "tenants." That's right, the thieves were spoken of as "tenants." The leftwing establishment was careful not to mention the inconvenient fact that the squatters
WERE NOT tenants, that they were nothing but burglars in the very truest sense of the term. It made a better story for the owner of the house to be dressed in a Snidely Whiplash outfit, complete with top hat and cape. The thieves, being white American citizens, didn't have the race card to play; but the class-envy card was enough to make them innocent victims. They weren't evil right-wing capitalists, so they could not be wrongdoers, that wouldn't fit the script.
As I say, this happened a long time ago. Enough time has passed that the children of that family may by now be doing their own break-ins just like Mom and Dad. But I've been reminded of the incident because of recent mortgage problems nationwide.
Now, I've never pretended to be an economics expert. My grown daughter (who, with her husband, actually PAID FOR the place where they live) works for a credit union, and understands far more than I do about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But I don't need to be a degreed economist to notice a slant in the public discussion. When home-buying is the subject, almost all I ever hear is how EEEEE-vil the sellers and lenders are. I don't deny that there are crooked businessmen and heartless rich people; my Mary came up against privileged, pampered crooks in a different context in the course of her honorable career as a nurse. But I know for a certainty that
there's ALSO such a thing as irresponsible behavior by some buyers, borrowers....and thieving squatters.
If you insist that the EEEEEE-vil rich people by themselves constitute the entire and complete explanation of the mortgage crisis, then you're not really looking for a complete explanation; you're only looking for a convenient villain, and you figure
that "Thou shalt not steal" should only be binding on the wealthy whom you want people to envy.
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