Archive for May, 2007
Home School Flirtations
Thursday, May 24th, 2007The end-of-year madness has begun. The next two weeks will be one activity after another for school and extra-curricular stuff.
And, I’ve had two people talk to me out-of-the-blue about home schooling. I’m torn about it. It would free us up to do some more interesting things, but I’m worried about losing my last neuron. Any thoughts?
American Idol Live Blogging–UPDATED
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007Gwen Stefani all flowered up. Kelly Clarkson angry. Don’t you feel like there is some serious back history with this girl? I think she’s been through hell. She doesn’t seem congruent with her success.
Weird yellow girl attacks Ryan. He gets lost for a minute. It feels like a staged Ricki Lake show.
The top six guys in white now singing with Smokey Robinson. Wow. He looks good. And his voice is so distinctive–he makes the boys sound….plain. Tears from a Clown. Great song.
GO BLAKE GO! Beat boxing with Doug E. Fresh! Woo Hoo! They did awesome!!
Why are we doing these stupid awards?
Blueberry Eyes says, “The girls are way better than the boys.” Amen to that, sister. Gladys Night. Oh, yes! Remember, how I compared Melinda to her? See her sell it? She believes the story she’s telling. Ewwww, Haley is back. I didn’t miss her vamping it up for the camera. Blech! But I sure did miss Gina! How cute does she look? On A Midnight Train To Georgia…whew! listen to Lakisha and Melinda hold their own with Gladys. Yow!
Tony Bennett. Sounds great–does he ever sound anything else? I just wonder, though, why the recording industry picks old greats to venerate. It seems so capricious. For a while it was Johnny Cash, now it’s Tony. Both deserving men, to be sure, I just don’t get the group think.
BeBe and CeCe Winans singing with Melinda up front. Lord of the Light, AMEN! Save the world from darkness. I wonder what Simon thinks of this unique American belief. As long as it makes money, right?
“I’ll stand by you” remake of the Pretenders. I like Chrissy Hines better, but Carrie Underwood does a nice job. What a beautiful girl. Six million records. And an award from Clive Davis. Woop-de-doo.
Sanjaya is back and still can’t sing. He gets the star treatment: Fanfare for the Common Man. Good grief! Why the hell did Joe Perry agree to this? He’s awesome. I’d just like to hear him play. Sanjaya can shut up any time.
Does winning matter? I don’t think so. Maybe losing means establishing your own terms. Well whaddya know….. Taylor Hicks answers my question for me. He’s annoying. Grandpa belongs in Las Vegas in a bar band. Snooze.
Reuban Stoddard–what a great voice. Why hasn’t he done better? Is he not cut out for the big-time pressure? He seems to have such a sweet personality. You know there will be a show some day about the psychological trauma of being on American Idol. It will be like those shows about child stars. Ha!
Blueberry Eyes says of Bette Midler, “She looks like an old grandma except with a good voice.” I can hear Randy saying, “Dog, dog, it’s all right. It was a little pitchy, but it was just all right.” Everyone loves her. A tear here and there.
Talk about dragging it out. Fifteen minutes left. Who’s in the finals again?
Kelly Clarkson sing Sargent Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band. Oh, I guess this is a butcher Beatles medley. Taylor, oh Taylor…. Redeemed by Reuben. I love his voice.
AND THE WINNER IS: JORDIN SPARKS!
UPDATE: I came out squarely in the middle of Brendan Loy’s Idol pool. A guy named Mark won the last six consecutive weeks. That’s pretty amazing. I was too emotionally attached to Melinda. I would have scored better. Oh well…. I think she’ll have a great career. Ditto Blake.
Breast is Best And Interesting News
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007Back to the breast, men. Why? Because God wants you to.
Another reason to get excited about iPods.
I’ve always wanted to do this with my Suburban. Maybe if I had a Hummer…..
And for all you Brown People Haters, you’ll like this.
Would these amendments to the Immigration Bill make you more likely to support it? It’s warming my cold, dark heart a bit.
Mickey Mouse propaganda that Disney won’t fight.
And from the hubris desk: another huge hurricane season. Because scientists just know it.
I predict Jordin Sparks will win. Because I just know it.
More on Illegal Immigration
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007The government has made a big show lately of rounding up illegals, doing whatever the government does, and then the spasm of mollifying is over. It seems to me that these stunts have a few purposes: terrify illegal immigrants, enrage illegal immigration activists, and shame those who want the problem of illegal immigration to be solved by something other than amnesty. The charade seems to be an orchestrated dance for affect–it certainly isn’t effective.
Again, being in Houston, a town that is 52% Hispanic (Mexican), gives me a perspective here that might be lost on the Blue Bloods condemning the “close minded” and “extreme right”. I’d like to think of myself as neither. It is still possible to be against the immigration bill and not be a racist xenophobe.
In fact, in Houston, there is a very peaceful co-existence between Anglo and Mexican, mainly because, I believe, many, many Mexicans were original citizens here. Remember the Alamo? Mexicans fought on the side of Texas, America, because they weren’t happy with the non-Democratic Mexican government headed by a megalomaniac, Santa Anna. Texas stood for freedom. Remember Sam Houston? Anyway, a survey given by a sociologist at Rice University (can’t find it right now) showed that the vast majority of white Houstonians (80%) viewed the Mexican immigrants (illegal or otherwise) in a positive way. The communities are so enmeshed through work, church and marriage that it would be impossible to separate now. Well, not impossible, but it probably would kill the community to try.
The border towns suffer miserably, though, with the illegal immigration problem. Crime is rampant. Illegals march through private property. Some ranches get stolen from over and over and over. Houston has the problems I mentioned a couple days ago.
Rounding up illegal immigrants will be rendered meaningless if the border isn’t shut. Most will come right back. It’s a dangerous and expensive trip. The border must be shut before any other law gets enacted. Yes, that will cause inflationary pressure in America. Well, maybe our clotted bureaucracy will then have an incentive to create an easier path to legal immigration. We need the citizens in America to deeply desire to be a part of the fabric of the country and community. We don’t need a fringe society.
Most American Muslims Assimilated, A Significant Minority Want To Kill You UPDATED Lutherns Too
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007UPDATED:
Iowahawk reports on a poll of Lutherns. This is significant:
Kohut pointed to one of the study’s key findings that only 29% of all respondents agreed that “bloody, random violence against infidels” was “always” or “frequently” justified, versus 56% who said such violence was “seldom” or “never” justified. The approval of violence rose slightly among younger Lutherans and when the hypothetical violence was targeted against Presbyterians, but still fell well short of a majority.“The only demographic cohort we saw where murderous random violence had a majority support was among 18-35 year old male followers of the Wisconsin Synod,” said Kohut. “And that was barely above the margin of error. Even then, fewer than half (41% to 46%) said they would personally volunteer to carry out the violence themselves.”
Well, I’m just happy about the majority. Focus on the positive, you know?
*******
Says Ace:
“Overwhelming majority.” 26%-69% on the terrorism justified vs. never justified question amoung young Muslim American males.Again, I was more hoping for something like a “unanimity.”
I ask of Mr. Hooper: Would he feel relieved if I told him right now 69% of young non-Muslim males opposed, but 26% supported, killing you and fellow Muslims due to our anger at their foreign policy?
I don’t think so. I think he’d call that “hatred” and “backlash.”
So I’m not getting why he thinks that we should be happy that only one in four young Muslim men are open to murdering the rest of us.
Ace goes on to illustrate how the media, and the polling company itself (Pew), obscure the important data for politically correct ends.
Cosmopolitan: I’ll Have A Pretzel with That Orgasm
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007As I’ve noted before, doctors offices receive all sorts of free magazines. A new magazine showed up this month: Cosmo. Young women learn to turn themselves into pretzels for men. They learn to excuse rotten male behavior. They learn to elevate the orgasm to be the end-all, be-all of a relationship. They learn to objectify themselves.
To summarize: Men are dogs. Women must live with it. I thought Cosmo was a feminist publication. Oh wait, it is.
Stupid Vegans
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007There are no other kind.
My husband groaned when I pointed out a couple weeks ago, the couple who starved their baby to death by refusing to give the baby protein. Stupid. And then there’s the family who starved their toddler a few years back. My husband, the chiropractic physician, knew that the news was blog-worthy and I would, eventually, blog about it. “Please don’t say vegans are stupid. Can you at least put it a nice way?” he urged. Well no, I can’t. Actually, I had forgotten about the stupid vegan thing, but Glenn Reynold’s post reminded me. He says he had a girlfriend who came down with Kwashiorkor from her vegan diet. Amusing and unsurprising.
One of my first patients in clinic was a stupid vegan. When I pointed out her leather shoes, she shrugged. The next week, she had on some plastic shoes. I told her that there was no way to stay healthy long-term by being vegan. She was a college student, a nice girl, but she was making herself increasingly sick with severe B vitamin deficiencies typical of long-term vegans and vegetarians. Her B vitamin deficiency was already contributing to an anemia that made her very sick when she menstruated. Eventually, she’d be that sick all the time.
“Have you seen one healthy vegan in your years of practice?” I asked my husband rhetorically. He knew the answer. We had treated one healthy vegetarian. She was very meticulous about her food pairings to get proteins. And she was healthy. One lady in ten years of practice.
Because we are in the “alternative health” field, we see more “alternative” lifestyles than the average health care practitioner. We see a lot of vegetarians and vegans. To a person, they are all marginally healthy. The vegans are sickly. Their bodies lack definition. Their demeanors lack vitality. Their skin is dull.
It serves no purpose to pretend that veganism is a healthy lifestyle choice. It’s not. Eventually, the stores of vitamin B12 in their livers will be depleted and they’ll descend into madness. More madness. I’m only slightly exaggerating. In addition to the B12 problem, they’ll have problems with folate, too. (Another B vitamin.) It is important to supplement with both, when supplementing with one. A pregnant or nursing woman should never adhere to a vegan diet.
When a patient says she is a vegan, I ask if it’s for health or philosophical reasons. If it’s health, we go through the science and end the nonsense. If it’s philosophical, I don’t even bother. I recommend the supplementation, ask the patient to look at the research, and hope for the best.
A friend of a friend came to a birthday party with her waifish two year old. She was a hostile little girl who was clearly malnourished. (I’d be irritable, too, if I was hungry and lacking nutrients.) There was no convincing this woman to add protein to her child’s diet. Her husband, an executive for Exxon, caused her no end of mortification. “What can I do? He works for an oil company,” she explained when I commented that their lifestyle was owed to a big American business. Anyway, she was starving her children once weaned from breastfeeding.
Nina Planck writes about parents starving their children with veganism in her “Death by Veganism” op-ed in The New York Times:
Responsible vegan parents know that breast milk is ideal. It contains many necessary components, including cholesterol (which babies use to make nerve cells) and countless immune and growth factors. When breastfeeding isn’t possible, soy milk and fruit juice, even in seemingly sufficient quantities, are not safe substitutes for a quality infant formula.Yet even a breast-fed baby is at risk. Studies show that vegan breast milk lacks enough docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, the omega-3 fat found in fatty fish. It is difficult to overstate the importance of DHA, vital as it is for eye and brain development.
A good diet is simple, really, and most people know the answer. Fresh fruits, lots of them, vegetables, and some meat. At least nine ounces of red meat a week, is a good goal to shoot for. Eggs, cheese, light on the sugar, moderate on the alcohol and good fats. Babies need breast milk. After that, they need a balanced diet including protein.
I don’t know what to think of the life sentences for the parents who starved their baby. I’m assuming it was from ignorance. While I’m happy that the sentence gets them beyond their child-bearing years, I’m not sure they fall into the same category as cold-blooded murderers. But the mother said that she loved her son and, “I did not starve him.” Well, she clearly starved him. At six weeks old, he died being only 3 and 1/2 pounds. And that’s a crime.
Go Out And Play
Monday, May 21st, 2007My mom would kick us out of the house and tell us not to come through the screen door one more time or else. Our yard wasn’t fenced. No one’s was. You could see neighbor’s yards up and down the street. The demand, “Go out and play!” was universal. Ann Althouse is bemused by the new trend in parenting, “Traditional Play“. What’s old is new again. Parents are kicking their kids out to play.
As a kid, I was kicked out. A lot. There were games of kick the can and tag and water balloons. My sister surreptitiously rode her bike three miles to her “boyfriend’s” house in second or third grade. That’s my daughter’s age. There is no way in hell I would allow my kids to do that today.
Last summer alone, there were three separate attempted kidnappings, thwarted by watchful but out of sight mothers, in our planned community. A week ago, a mother returned to her car from the preschool with her child where her infant sat in a car seat waiting (a two minute turn around) to find some guy in the car. He quickly ran out and jumped into a car with another person. Car jacking? Attempted kidnapping?
In my neighborhood, there have been two break-ins in broad daylight and one car stolen out of the driveway. I live in a good neighborhood. The crime rate is realtively low.
But here’s the differences from when I was a kid. Most of the neighborhood is filled with couples or single people or retirees or families where both parents work or some combination of the above. One street has only one family with children. Oh, and those without kids (most of the neighborhood) drive like they’re in the Indianapolis 500. There are yard workers everywhere. There are contractors here and there. With air conditioning and houses closed up, no one can hear someone in distress.
It is simply not the same as when I was a kid. Friends of ours moved out to the country and built three lots backing up to a stream so their kids could run amok, safely. They’ve been robbed three times.
It’s not like it was all innocence when I was a kid. I walked about a mile to Kindergarten by myself, with a group of neighborhood kids and one street over another Kindergartener was abducted and the case has never been solved. When I was in High School, the mother of a girl on my basketball team was raped by a serial stalker/rapist. That guy was loose during a very hot summer and all the women were terrified because the windows had to be left open or suffocate. No one had air conditioning in Michigan.
Our solution, has been to build a pool and put play stuff in the yard. The kids beg to go out and play, but I still have to supervise. There are just too many unknown people in the neighborhood. There is no rhythm like when I was a kid–dads leave at 7 or 8. Dads home at 6. People have crazy hours. People travel all over for work. What can I do? Let them go?
I want a return to traditional play. That would be great. I wonder at the luxury of turning loose my kids for hours upon hours and telling them to “be home by dinner”.
Can you imagine the condemnation if something happened to my child? The world is a different place today. It just is.
Double Daddys Single DNA
Monday, May 21st, 2007I’m no judge, but this would be my solution to idiotic identical twin brothers denying custody of a child who clearly belongs to one of them: Split the child support down the middle. Give mom sole custody. And make the brothers share custody together when they’re with the daughter/niece.
And if they don’t like that solution, make them BOTH pay full child support.
Carter Speaks For Many
Monday, May 21st, 2007Dismissing Leftists for being irrelevant relics would seem rational except their delusion has extended to believing that the last election mandated making their delusion proudly public, which makes dismissing Leftists dangerous–their delusion, unanswered, becomes, say, conventional wisdom. Dogma. They ran on centrist politics which got them elected, and, since Speaker Pelosi’s coronation, become bold in their radical ways. Former President Carter typifies the brazen disrespect for the office he once held and the country he claims to love. But like Jeff Goldstein notes, it’s more than that:
…you can give the guy 15 Nobel Peace Prizes, honor him with a million “humanitarian” awards, and pretend until the end of time that he is some sort of sage and world-wearied saint walking among us, reminding America of What It Should Be—and still, no amount of artificial burnishing of his “peace” credentials, or “manufactured consent” over his foreign policy wisdom, or revisionist history over his tenure as President will change the fact that Carter is a living, breathing embodiment of what is worst in the American character: the willingness to buy cheap grace at the expense of addressing difficult moral choices honestly and without predictable moral posturings; the desire to saddle ourselves with a kind of forced humility in an effort to diminish our national successes lest we begin believing our own hype about the historical superiority of a country founded on a belief in freedom and individual liberty; the ease with which we can assign bad-faithed motives to our ideological opponents; and the facile “understanding” of the human condition that has, by way of sheer intellectual laziness, led to a shallow, feel-good puddle of cultural relativism that, ironically, finds the faults of its own culture disproportionate to the collective faults of all other cultures (which, of course, it can’t presume to analyze—because doing so from our own cultural perspective does the Other the same disservice that Heisenburg’s gaze did to any object it happened to fix on).
Jimmy Carter typifies the Left’s perspective: judgmental, condescending, zero self-awareness and blissful ignorance at the reality swirling around the world these days. But the former president possesses something worse, or rather, he lacks some very important traits for a man who claims Christ. Namely, he lacks the fruits of the spirit and the actions of love.
His razor-sharp tongue has been brandished as a weapon as late. He has no trouble speaking evil of dignitaries. He has no trouble vaunting himself or behaving unseemly. He could hardly be described as temperate or kind. He certainly shows no love for his enemies. (His chief enemy occupies the White House, not the rogue nations around the world. Those are his friends.) His rhetoric and demeanor is joyless. And the last thing he seems to seek with his ideological opponents is peace.
Now, I’m not here to condemn Jimmy Carter. His spiritual walk is between God and him. That said, his very public life, due to his very public statements, do reveal his fruit. His rotten fruit. Out of the abudance of the heart, the mouth speaks. And he keeps on speaking and revealing a root of bitterness that somewhere along the line took serious hold.
What has America done to Jimmy Carter that justifies his antipathy?
It would be easy enough to discuss the psychology of his pathology, but that really doesn’t matter in the scheme of things. The man needs behavior modification. Since he speaks for many, heres some advice for his followers and ideological adherents:
- Argue constructively. Name-calling isn’t constructive.
- Show some respect. Good grief! I’m no fan of President Clinton, but he was the President of the United States of America, the world’s only super power. Just on the outside chance there is some divine providence involved, give the office of the president respect.
- Consider the notion that your opponents have given as much thought to their opinions as you have given to yours. Or is that why you’re so dismissive?
- Shut. Up. Bile dripping vitriol demeans the person using the rhetorical device when the content of the argument is either unhelpful, ill-considered and/or just plain wrong.
Grandma Pelosi’s threatening to sue the President. Comedians insulting the President to his face. Pastors using the House of the Lord at a funeral to denigrate the President’s, who sits in front of him, policies. The press’s non-stop amplification of the President’s verbal mistakes and general awkwardness. Jimmy Carter’s disrespect for the office he failed at himself (he, of all people, should know how difficult it is to be President). There seems to be no shortage of contempt for President Bush.
President Bush is a big man. He can take it. What is diminished by the non-stop poison is the office of President itself. What is diminshed is notion of constructive debate. What is diminished is the spirit of the people engaged.
