Not Guilty By Association?

John Kerry and his wife have made me want to renounce my Heinz 57 sauce. However, there may be no need for that:

"It's just crazy," [company spokeswoman Debbie] Foster said. "We haven't been involved in politics since Morris the Cat ran for president in 1988" — when the company ran a spoof campaign with Morris, the face of Heinz 9 Lives cat food, as the finicky candidate.

Heinz Kerry, who was married to Republican Senator H. John Heinz III when he was killed in a 1991 plane crash, is not on Heinz's board and is in no way involved with company management, Foster said.

Collectively, Heinz Kerry, along with her children with John Heinz and The Heinz Endowments which she chairs, own less than 4 percent of outstanding company stock.

"Don't link me!"

Steve at Rodent Regatta posted a link to an article almost two years ago. The writer of that article recently commented on that post. She said he was violating her copyright and asked him to remove the link.

First of all, what's this about a link being a "copyright violation"? That's downright silly.

Secondly, even if the post had a brief excerpt from the article, that would be well within Fair Use rights, would it not?

Finally, this writer must not want her work to be read if she's going around telling people not to link her. I certainly hope Google and other search engines haven't indexed her article or even (**gasp**) cached it.

It's too bad that this blog is defunct.

I think I'm already there...

Since I've lost what meager blogging mojo I had, here's a quiz until I find it again:

Are you damned?
Brought to you by Rum and Monkey

(Via Rev. Mike.)

Well, it's official...

I had an ultrasound on Wednesday. My doctor's office called me today and I do indeed have gallstones. I just knew it.

**sigh**

In addition to all this, my poor Mom has come down with a nasty case of shingles.

What a week...

Now, if you'll excuse me...

...I'm going to go play with my new Mac iBook!

Blog Moves

Dispatches from Outland has moved off Blogspot. And Jay Solo has joined forces with his wife and they are both now blogging at Accidental Verbosity. Update your bookmarks!

Some final words on that Yassin business...

Adrian Warnock says that "murder isn't right". This is true, of course. But was the Yassin assassination murder? The way I look at it, Israel is at war, whether they want to be or not. They killed someone who was responsible for plotting the deliberate deaths of hundreds of innocent people who did nothing except ride a bus or go to a restaurant. The assassination was an act of war, but not murder. Now some will insist on cheapening the word "murder" by saying that all killing is murder. If such a person is a Christian, I would ask them why God said, "You shall not murder," and then turned around and commanded the Israelites to go to war against their enemies. If all killing is murder, if war is murder, why does God contradict Himself like this?

This whole subject brings this article to mind: Touchstone Magazine - The Problem of War. Here's something to think about from that article (but, as always, RTWT):

Intuition provides a stronger case for pacifism. We seem to feel very strongly that love and helping are good, while hate and harming are bad. What this intuition fails to tell us, however, is how we are to love and help the innocent who are being treated unjustly by the wicked without using force on the wicked. So intuition in this case leads us astray because it does not see (not immediately at least) what reason sees: that you can love and use force at the same time. Lewis deals with this point explicitly in the chapter on forgiveness in Mere Christianity:

[F]or loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment—even to death. If one had committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged. It is therefore perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian to kill an enemy.

When we use force in a just cause, we do to others as we would have others do to us. We admit that, if we do evil, then we hope there will be someone who is able to stop us from doing it—even if he has to use force to stop us. Thus, we are led by logic to admit that, if we see evil being done by others, we need to stop them if we are able, even if it means using force.

And one more thing comes to mind -- the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Here was a man -- someone who was a pacifist -- who finally came to the conclusion that the only way to stop Hitler and his evil was to kill him. Bonhoeffer was executed for his participation in a failed assassination plot against Hitler. He is widely regarded as a martyr -- and he is.

Update: Okay, here are some final final thoughts. It would be nice if the pacifist/pacifist-leaning side* of the Christian blogosphere would spend as much energy condemning real evil (like that perpetrated by Hamas) as they do getting upset at blog posts. (*For the record, I'm not necessarily lumping Adrian Warnock in with that side.)

Then there was this comment over at Andrea Harris' site by Sortelli: "If you disconnect your ability to hate something wicked, you’ve lost your ability to love what is good." I think that statement wraps this whole subject up with a neat little bow.

And there was much rejoicing whining...

Joshua Claybourn noted the striking resemblance of the late Hamas "spiritual leader" Sheikh Yassin to Saruman. This caused a couple of bloggers to get their shorts in a bunch. They accused Josh of "rejoicing" over this terrorist's death. More disturbingly, they seem to be engaging in moral equivalency, saying that the Israelis taking out a terrorist is just as bad as Palestinians blowing up innocent people in cafes and buses. I just hope neither one of those bloggers ever reads this post over at Little Tiny Lies...they might faint!

Interesting...

Using this site, you can look and see who contributed to whose Presidential campaign. Here are the results for the Pensacola area. I noticed that several very prominent trial lawyers just loved John Edwards, Wesley Clark and Bob Graham.

(Via Tim Blair.)

Site Tweaks

I wanted to add inline trackbacks to my individual entries, but I didn't want to have to rebuild an entry just so new trackbacks would show up. So, I used this method from Scriptygoddess to add them. I changed a few things to suit my purposes, but not by much. I think it looks nicer to have everything in the individual entry, kind of like a TypePad blog.

The monthly and category archives no longer bring up comment or trackback boxes when you click on those respective links -- they now go to the appropriate place in the individual entry. I'm going to keep the comment and trackback boxes on the main page, because I find them convenient. (I also went to some trouble skinning them!)

Loathsome

How evil do you have to be to hold up a sign like this? Is the anti-war crowd really this far gone? (I won't call them "peace" protesters, because they aren't.) Are this many of them mindlessly anti-American and pro-terrorist? Do they sincerely believe preposterous things like Bush = Hitler?

I mean, you can make reasonable objections to the Iraq war. You can be an extreme pacifist and be against war for any reason, even for self-defense and the defense of others. While I may disagree with you and think your position is untenable, I don't see you as being anything like the scumbags in the pictures linked above. But, like it or not, that is the public face of your cause.

Update: As usual, Lileks says it best. And one more thing: compassionate, loving, peaceful peace activists deliberately and gleefully trample an old lady.

Happenings in Iran

It looks like something is going on in Iran, although the mainstream media hasn't caught on yet. Cox & Forkum has a good overview of what's been going on. So does Joshua Claybourn. And be sure to check Free Iran News for updates.

Same-Sex Marriage -- Two Views

Although this topic has been debated on various blogs, I've pretty much avoided it here. Instead of boring you with my own ineptly expressed thoughts on this, let me point to this Thomas Sowell column and this piece by Donald Sensing, because they both make excellent points that I agree with. Sowell looks at SSM mostly from a legal standpoint, and Sensing addresses it mostly from a moral and societal standpoint.

(Second link via lots of folks.)

Speaking of feeds...

I have added an Atom feed to this site.

Also on the sidebar, under "Site Extras", I have added a button linking to my Furl public archive. (The Furl archive has a feed, too.) Furl is a very useful site I discovered when Relapsed Catholic linked it a couple of months ago. I use it to file away interesting articles -- things that might get lost in the shuffle if I bookmarked them in my browser.

Blog News

Times Against Humanity has moved to a spiffy new location. Update your bookmarks.

For those who use Blogger/Blogspot: Did you know that you can now get an Atom feed for your blog? I noticed that some of the Blogger blogs have already discovered this and have turned it on. Others do not yet have a feed. Go here for instructions on how to turn on your feed. Then I can put your blog feed in my aggregator and read you more often.

Fallout from the 3/11 Attack

There are two responses to terrorists. You can gather your strength, stand up to them and say, "No more!" Or you can cower and say, "Please don't hurt me again...I'll do whatever you want." Spain has decided to do the latter. In the meantime, many continue to be angry at America because we did the former. Appeasement will only bring more attacks and more trouble. This is something to keep in mind with the upcoming election.

Neal Boortz says it best:

So, you think this election is about jobs and health care? There are about 200 people in Spain who will no longer benefit from any health care, and another 1200 who probably won't be going to work for today .. or for a while ... or maybe never. Is Al-Qaeda back? Maybe they never left! The supposedly peaceful religion of Islam has struck again, brutally murdering 192 people, and wounding more than 1200. If you think the war on terror isn't important, then it's time to get your head out of the sand, or whatever dark region you have it stored.

Unless you have been living under a rock, by now you have heard what happened. 10 backpack bombs exploded within a 15-minute span, starting at about 7:40am yesterday aboard commuter trains. Police also detonated three more bombs. A stolen van was found near Madrid containing seven detonators and an Arabic tape with Koran verses on it. The Spanish government initially pointed the finger at a separatist group, but then a letter was faxed to Reuters by an Al-Qaeda-backed group. They referred to the attack as "operation death trains." The attack occurred 911 days after September 11th. Another letter was faxed to the Associated Press office in Cairo warning that America was next. That's right; Al-Qaeda says America is next.

You have a role to play here. You have a decision to make ... and that decision will be made on November 2nd. You will decide who is going to lead this country in this time of peril .. this era of Islamic terrorism. Maybe you'll want to chose someone who has proven that he will use the American military and whatever resources are available to him to hunt these terrorists down and kill them. Or maybe you'll want to chose the man who says that this is all a law enforcement problem; someone who, if he does manage to catch these Islamic predators with his glorified police force, will then turn them over to some international tribunal for trial. As the great Og Mandino once said, "Use wisely your power of choice."

Sympathy

What's been going on...

First the good news: I've lost a total of 42.5 pounds since July!

Now the bad news: I may have gallstones or an ulcer. (I think it's gallstones.) I'm having some tests done in a couple of weeks.

Almost back...

I'll be posting regularly again soon. In the meantime, look who's posting again:

• Cut on the Bias


• Sand in the Gears


• Anne Wilson

On Hiatus

I'm taking a break. I'll be back in a week or two.