I'm late on this...

But let me say that I thought that President Bush's surprise Thanksgiving visit to our troops was very cool. Bush respects the military, and they sense this and respect him in return.

I know that Hillary Clinton has also visited our troops, and if I weren't so darned cynical about everything involving the Clintons, I'd praise her too. However, there was no love lost between the Clinton administration and the military. Also, Hillary is rather infamous for having disdain for the military. So, I'm really not surprised that she got a cool reception from our troops. I think they know when they are truly respected and when they are simply being used.

Christmas Skin, etc.

I'm not quite "back" from my break yet, but I did want to go ahead and tell you about the new Christmas skin. It has been set as the default skin. It will go away after the end of December, so I'm not putting it in the gallery. However, you can switch to it via the link on the sidebar...or you can just click here. Here's a screenshot:

Also, I added formatting links to the comments form. (Thanks to Scriptygoddess.) The only problem is that it only works in IE.

Goodbye BlogSpot

Lee Anne Millinger has moved to a sparkling new Typepad blog. Go check it out!

A brief pause...

(Make your own church sign.)

I'm going to be kind of busy for the next week or so, so I'm taking a short break from blogging. I'll be back in about a week or so. Have a great Thanksgiving!

Taking the Jacko-Free Pledge

Dean is making his blog a Jacko-Free Zone™ and I think it's wise to do likewise. This whole thing promises to be a media circus that will make the OJ trial look low-key in comparison. This will be my only post on the whole subject. My opinions are as follows:

• If you want to get an idea of what's going on inside this guy, just look at how he has mutilated himself over the years.
• I'm very much inclined to think he's guilty. Remember the old saying -- where there's smoke, there's fire. And we've been getting whiffs of smoke for a long time.
• Any parents who allowed their children to participate in "sleepovers" with Jacko are A) really stupid or B) disgusting human beings who had no problem pimping their children out for money.
• These people are complete, idol-worshipping idiots.
• I've always thought his music sucked, anyway.
• I pray for the children who have been victimized.

That about covers it. I'm done with this subject.

Fake Blogs

First comment spam, now this.

(Via Bene Diction.)

Learning About Clinton the Hard Way

Via Susanna comes this story about how Harlem residents wonder why their neighbor, one who promised so much, is never around.

Some expected quite a lot of Clinton:

Rebecca Pacheco, 23, says that if Mr. Clinton were around more often, he might be able to help her find a job: "Maybe you could have your people's people's people help me out."

Good grief! However, many of Clinton's neighbors remain true believers:

Even so, the dozen or so people interviewed outside Mr. Clinton's office last week said their appetite for the man remained unslaked. No one on 125th Street seemed to begrudge the former president for spreading his largesse around the globe. Still, nearly all of them suggested that charity begins at home.

"Our president now doesn't think about people less fortunate than himself," said Jovanna Ford, 24, who was taking a high school equivalency class inside Mr. Clinton's building. "Clinton's mind is in the right place. He just needs to get back on the job."

I don't know whether to laugh or have pity.

Actually, after reading Steve H.'s commentary on this, I do know -- I'll laugh.

Shaking Your Fist at God

I have done the same thing that Dean is doing in this post many times. No, I don't mean that I've renounced Christianity (or if I did, I didn't mean it). I mean that I've been so angry at God that I've thought that He must be evil. Full of pride and self-righteousness, I would wonder how a good and just God could, well, fill in the blank. Yes, I thought that I knew better than God how things ought to be. However, I would get over these foot-stamping, petulant fits of anger.

I'm not saying that Dean is being petulant, here. His differences with God seem to be far more serious. But the spirit of pride in many of his comments is one I'm familiar with, because I've said pretty much the same things myself. Here is what C.S. Lewis has to say about Pride:

There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians ever imagine that they are guilty themselves....The essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil; Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind...As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

For more on this, Michael Williams does a much better job responding than I ever could.

Update (11/21/03): I neglected to note that the above C.S. Lewis quote is from Mere Christianity. I highly recommend this book to Dean or anyone else who struggles with understanding Christianity.

Blogroll Out of Service

I checked my blog and wondered what on earth was going on with my blogroll. I checked to see if others were having the same problem, and according to Dean and Kevin, BlogRolling has been hacked. So the blogroll has been removed for the time being.

Update: It's back now.

Self-Portrait

You can create a portrait of yourself at this site. I look kinda, sorta like this, except I'm blonde.

(Via E-Pression.)

Let's see if this works...

Well, it looks like my host is having problems again. I was trying to close the comments on some old posts and I keep getting "500 Internal Server" errors. So, if you try to post a comment or trackback to me and get an error, that's why.

Update: Whatever the problem was, it looks like it has cleared up, for now. I hope this won't become some recurring issue.

More about that tiny guitar...

Last week, I posted about this nanoguitar. Well here's more about that guitar and the significance behind creating these tiny devices:

New York Times - Atomic Scales: Striking Notes of Progress on the World's Tiniest Guitar

If nanomanufacturing comes of age, something as tiny as a nanodrum or nanoharp might be mass-produced for use as extremely sensitive detectors for ultra high-frequency waves. Scientists have recently demonstrated infinitesimal nanotube thermometers and nanobalances capable of weighing a single virus. All this may foreshadow a day when doctors use nanocapsules to carry medicines, a few molecules at a time, to precise locations in the body, and nanorobots to crawl through the bloodstream and repair cells.

Okay, call me a geek, but I just think this stuff is fascinating!

(Via Rodent Regatta.)

Dumb Hollywood

Here we go again...arrogant celebrities look down on the "little people" who made them rich:

But what about this Michael Moore screed about Americans in the London Mirror earlier this month? “They are possibly the dumbest people on the planet. ...We Americans suffer from an enforced ignorance. We don’t know about anything that’s happening outside our country. Our stupidity is embarrassing.”

Until Michael Moore pointed it out, you probably didn’t know how embarrassingly stupid you are. In fact, you probably have so little intelligence you didn’t know that Moore isn’t the only celebrity who thinks you’re dumb. Indeed, Moore has colleagues in the celebrity kingdom who think the same thing.

The article goes on to tell us what great intellects like Martin Sheen, Cher and Rob Reiner think of President Bush. Of course, they all say Bush is a dummy. How original...

But yet, according to Michelle Malkin, Hollywood loves dummies who are pretty and blonde:

The same "progressive" Hollywood celebrities who sneer at President Bush's mediocre college grades work in an industry that has long prided itself on, and profited from, popularizing anti-intellectualism. From Marilyn Monroe to Suzanne Somers to Anna Nicole Smith, the deification of the ditz has been a staple of the entertainment world.

I guess those dummies are okay if they know their place...

(First link via LGF, second via Boortz.)

Is starvation and dehydration "painless"?

Wesley J. Smith has a point by point smackdown of the rationalizations made for starving and dehydrating Terri Schiavo (and those like her).

Some compare withdrawing a feeding tube from a disabled person to not forcing food on a cancer patient who has stopped eating. These are two completely different situations -- they are not equivalent at all:

Yes, it is true that when people are actively dying from terminal disease, they often refuse food and water. The disease makes the food and water repulsive to them. In such circumstances, it is medically inappropriate to force food and water into a person who is actively rejecting it. Indeed, doing so could cause suffering.

But this isn't what is happening to Terri. She isn't dying of cancer. Her body isn't shutting down as part of the natural dying process. Indeed, she is not dying at all--unless her food and water is taken away.

So, what exactly happens to someone who is starving and dehydrating to death?

When I conducted research on this question in preparation for writing my book "Forced Exit," I asked St. Louis neurologist William Burke these very questions. Here is what he told me:

"A conscious [cognitively disabled] person would feel it just as you or I would. They will go into seizures. Their skin cracks, their tongue cracks, their lips crack. They may have nosebleeds because of the drying of the mucus membranes, and heaving and vomiting might ensue because of the drying out of the stomach lining. They feel the pangs of hunger and thirst. Imagine going one day without a glass of water! Death by dehydration takes ten to fourteen days. It is an extremely agonizing death."

But you may be thinking, "That's just what one neurologist says." Okay, how about the testimony of someone who was in a state very similar to Terri's:

At age 33, Kate Adamson collapsed from a devastating and incapacitating stroke. She was utterly unresponsive and was diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). At the urging of doctors, who believed she would never get better, her nourishment was stopped. But midway through the dehydration process, she began to show subtle signs of comprehension, so her food and water were restored.

So, did Kate Adamson feel pain?

When the feeding tube was turned off for eight days, I thought I was going insane. I was screaming out in my mind, "Don't you know I need to eat?" And even up until that point, I had been having a bagful of Ensure as my nourishment that was going through the feeding tube. At that point, it sounded pretty good. I just wanted something. The fact that I had nothing, the hunger pains overrode every thought I had. [...]

I craved anything to drink. Anything. I obsessively visualized drinking from a huge bottle of orange Gatorade. And I hate orange Gatorade. I did receive lemon flavored mouth swabs to alleviate dryness but they did nothing to slack my desperate thirst.

But what about painkillers? Won't that stop the suffering?

At this point, defenders of removing feeding tubes from people with profound cognitive disabilities might claim that whatever painful sensations dehydration may cause, these patients receive palliating drugs to ensure that their deaths are peaceful. But note: Adamson either did not receive such medications, or if she did, they didn't work. Moreover, because these disabled people usually can't communicate, it is impossible to know precisely what they experience.

I tried to hit on the major points of this piece, but you really should read the whole thing.

Link via Mark Shea, who has been driving home the point lately that we are not the perfect, civilized society that we think ourselves as being. This is a point that some don't want to hear, and I won't deny that it's hard to listen to. But we need to listen.

New Skin: Gibson & Lavender

This skin was a lot of work, but I think it came out very nicely. The front page randomly displays one of ten possible Charles Dana Gibson drawings. They range from the romantic to the humorous. The random image display is done with PHP code. I used the method found here and modified it slightly. Here's the code I used, if you're interested:

<?php
$random_number = rand(1,10);
echo '<img src="/nav/images/16-gibson'.$random_number.'.jpg">'
?>

This skin is available in the drop down menu and will be added to the gallery shortly. Enjoy!

Veterans Day

To all veterans, thank you!

Schiavo Columns

Here are a couple of columns about the Terri Schiavo case that are well worth reading:

• Patterico has this column on CaliforniaRepublic.org: Fighting For Her Life - Inflicting 'Capital Punishment' on Terri Schiavo. Patterico points out why it was appropriate for Gov. Bush and the Florida legislature to step in in this case:

  But the situation is quite different for Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman whose husband obtained court approval to have her feeding tube removed - and would even have been worse had she been a resident of California. Unlike a convicted murderer, Ms. Schiavo was ordered to die based on the findings of a single judge, applying a standard of proof typically reserved for civil cases involving monetary awards, rather than life-or-death issues. If the political left had its way, Ms. Schiavo's death warrant could not be countermanded by the governor, as could occur in a criminal case. Finally, Ms. Schiavo was ordered to die in a way -- forced starvation and dehydration -- that would never be tolerated as a means of executing a murderer. Worst of all, a patient in Ms. Schiavo's position in California would likely receive even less protection under the law than Ms. Schiavo has received in Florida. [...]

  If issues of similar significance were raised in a capital murder case, calling into question whether courts were correct to order a death sentence, liberals would rush into action to prevent the possibility of an unjust execution. But here, where the person condemned to die was not convicted of murder, the political left seems eager to ignore any suggestion that the courts might be wrong. When Governor Bush acted to save Terri Schiavo's life, howls of outrage from the left were heard from coast to coast.

• Nat Hentoff on the Schiavo case: Lying about Terri Schiavo.
  

  For 13 years, Terri Schiavo has not been able to speak for herself. But she is not brain-dead, not in a comatose state, not terminal, and not connected to a respirator. If the feeding tube is removed, she will starve to death. Whatever she may or may not have said, did she consider food and water "artificial means?"

  The media continually report that Terri is in a persistent vegetative state, and a number of neurologists and bioethicists have more than implied to the press that "persistent" is actually synonymous with "permanent." This is not true, as I shall factually demonstrate in upcoming columns. I will also provide statements from neurologists who say that if Terri were given the proper therapy—denied to her by her husband and guardian after he decided therapy was becoming too expensive despite $750,000 from a malpractice suit—she could learn to eat by herself and become more responsive.

  Terri is responsive, beyond mere reflexes. Having this degree of sentience, if she is starved to death, she will not "die in peace" as The New York Times predicts in an uninformed October 23 editorial supporting the husband. What happens to someone who can feel pain during the process of starvation is ghastly.
  

  
  (Via Open Book.)
  

Straining Out Gnats

Mac Swift takes exception to a piece written by the recently deceased Mike Yaconelli: Fundamentalism - A monumental waste of time. I remember seeing this article linked on another blog shortly after Yaconelli's death, and I mostly agreed with it and even considered blogging about it.

I don't think Yaconelli is making an argument for libertinism here. He is simply warning against the dangers of legalism. One thing that he pointed out is that fundamentalism emphasizes "don't" too much. Don't do this, don't do that...don't, don't, don't. While they are more than willing to say that you shouldn't drink a glass or wine or that you shouldn't watch a certain movie, they seem to ignore the important things. They have a tendency to "strain out a gnat but swallow a camel."

Fundamentalists, because of their obsession with things that don't matter, have, in effect, made the Gospel irrelevant.

How sad. Because if anyone should understand the Gospel, it should be fundamentalists. Soren Kierkegaard once told a story about some robbers who broke into a jewelry store and didn't steal anything...they simply rearranged the price tags.

It makes one wonder if the fundamentalists haven't done what they have accused the liberals of doing...eliminated the absolutes. Not deliberately, of course, but by rearranging the price tags they have put high price tags on the issues of no worth and made cheap and irrelevant the issues that really matter.

Let me try to give an example of what I think Yaconelli is getting at. Alcohol abuse is a terrible, destructive thing. But there is nothing wrong with drinking in moderation. If you lump both activities together as being sinful, then what you are saying is that binge-drinking is equivalent to having a glass of wine with dinner.

Mac believes that Yaconelli has a bigoted attitude towards fundamentalists. I just don't see it, myself. Strong disagreements do not equal bigotry. I disagree with Catholics on some things, but I'm not anti-Catholic. I have strong disagreements with Calvinism, but I don't hate Calvinists.

There are a lot of things going on that Christians should be concerned about: poverty, persecution, the devaluation of human life, the decline of sexual mores. Obsessing on people saying "damn" or seeing an R-rated movie seems silly when faced with the more important issues.

Rockwell Rocks!

Golly Gee!! You are NORMAN ROCKWELL.
You are a painter of simple, everyday happenings.
You tend to avoid the outrageous and stay well
within the guidelines of society. Your friends
count on you for your loyalty and level-
headedness.


Which famous artist most reflects your personality?
brought to you by Quizilla

(Via Jay Solo.)

A Little Miracle

This story was in my local paper today. I just think it's a beautiful story: A little one's blessed birth - Baby Olivia survives just 22 weeks in womb.

Weight Problems

This post by Rosemary at Dean's World has inspired me to post about something that I've wanted to talk about, but didn't for a variety of reasons.

Okay, here's the deal -- I'm overweight. But I'm trying to do something about it. I've been following the Weight Watchers program since July. I've lost 25.5 pounds so far. I still need to lose more, but I'm already feeling and looking better. You see, heart disease, cancer and diabetes run in my family. And I'm already on Lipitor for high cholesterol. I'm losing weight mainly for health reasons, although I won't deny that I want to look better as well. I don't want to be boney and anorexic looking...I just want to maintain a healthy weight.

I haven't mentioned this before because I consider this a rather personal subject. My weight has gone up and down my entire adult life. (I was a skinny kid.) I have dieted and exercised and lost lots of weight before, but it has a way of coming back...and you ignore it. Think of the old "frog in a pot of boiling water" analogy. I'm hoping that this time, I will stay vigilant and keep the weight off. I don't want to go through this again.

I'm not really an overeater, but I have a weakness for rich, fatty foods (sweets especially). I tend to favor meats and starches over fruits and vegetables. And I hate exercise. However, I'm learning to eat more healthy foods, while trying to find less fatty, sugary ways to fulfill my cravings. I'm drinking much more water, which is very important when losing weight. When I do eat the more fattening foods, I control the portions. I still don't exercise that much, so I need to work on that. My own preferences and habits, my own likes and dislikes, my own choices, caused me to gain weight. Having crappy metabolism doesn't help the situation. If I had a better metabolism, then perhaps I could get away with eating sweets and fried foods and not exercising. But I can't, unfortunately.

As far as how the society treats overweight people, yes, people do look down on those who are overweight. I'm ashamed to admit that I've even done it when I was thin. I would get prideful and arrogant and think, "Well, I did something about my weight, why can't she?" After gaining the weight back, I would think back on this attitude with shame. I felt that God was punishing me for my arrogance. Pride truly is one of the greatest sins.

I started going to Weight Watchers because several of my Internet friends tried it and they were very successful. I had lost weight by myself before, but I just couldn't do it by myself this time. I couldn't maintain the motivation and I would get discouraged and backslide. Going for a weigh-in every week and talking with people who are going through the same thing helps me to stay motivated.

So, that's my story. Now that I've "outed" myself, I will occasionally post on my progress. One thing I know for sure -- I'm determined to get to a healthy weight, and I ain't going back!

Bad Album Covers

The other day, I linked to the worst Halloween costumes of all time. Now, here's more badness: Worst Album Covers Ever.

(Via The Rattler.)

The Tiniest Guitar

After being invented years ago, this nanoguitar was finally "played" for the first time -- using laser light.

Click on image for larger view.

(Via Common Sense and Wonder.)

Thank You, President Bush

(Via Joshua Claybourn.)

Phelps' Filth

A lot of blogs have been mentioning the latest disgusting stunts pulled by Fred Phelps and his "church". Lee Anne Millinger linked to this post by Gary Petersen, who condemns Phelps' hate-filled actions and message. Today, blogs4God mentions Westboro Baptist Church in this piece about how not to present the Gospel to people. Dean Esmay recently posted about Phelps, and wondered if people might be giving him exactly what he wants -- attention.

Yes, Phelps does know how to get attention. And the media is all too willing to give it to him and his "church", which is really a hate group. At the risk of giving Phelps more attention, I think it's important for Christians to speak out against this man's evil. Unfortunately, there are those who want to believe that Phelps is representative of what Christians think and believe.

As pointed out in this post by Bene Diction, in the comments to Lee Anne's post I mentioned this unauthorized biography of Phelps: Addicted to Hate. It makes for deeply disturbing reading. His congregation is made up almost entirely of his children and grandchildren. Addicted to Hate explains why this is the case, and why these family members continue to follow him.

Just Testing...

My host moved my site to another server late Friday night, and I've been having problems since the move. Apparently, the problems have been resolved.

To make a long story short, it looks like they didn't have cgiwrap or suexec available on the new server, which made me unable to make new posts (or rebuild old ones without changing configuration settings). To get around this, you can change the attributes to 777, but my host doesn't allow this, and for good reason (it's a security risk). It looks like they've fixed the problem, because I can post and rebuild again.