Quite the mixed bag once again. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll feel hungry.
- Just warning you seriously, the following is not remotely funny. Want to see an example of how to report on an abortion and sound deep, while begging every salient question and writing on a paint-thin level? Read this.
- Still not funny: health care. Brent Littlefield reflects on Senator Benjamin L. Cardin (D [duh], Md) who, faced with the overwhelmingly negative reaction of real-life people to Obamacare, retorts, "I'm more
resolved than ever.... I love debating. I'm sorry more of that couldn't happen this week because of so much of the shouting, but I personally believe the American people [his opposing audience was not composed of Americans?] still want us to deal with tough problems. We're not all going to agree, that's obvious, but we're at the point we need a specific bill." Translation: I'm from the government, I'm here to help you — by ramming something you don't want down your throat! Now get out of my way! - M'man Dr. Matt Harmon (mentioned last week) provides the remaining five points from his talk on the Kingdom of God and Social Justice — and they're also very good.
- Talking dogs! A Poor Writing Alert: "One of the dogs was taken away to the pound, claiming it was a stray that had been hanging out...." Well, at least they gave it a chance to speak for itself before carting it away. (And people go to school to learn to write like this.)
- Talking vegetables! You can get a Veggietales iPhone app. No, really. (No, I won't.)
- The Washington Post lists 35 iPhone apps it rates as worthwhile. Not all are free. Too many are games. (I've get to load or play a game on my iPhone, and I doubt I ever shall.) (Uh... this doesn't count.)
- Unsurprising. President Obama, er, isn't completely truthful about abortion coverage to a bunch of gullible "religious leaders."
- Depravity Update. How low can you go? Well, actually, I'm sure we all know nauseating stories. But for sheer needing-a-severe-hiney-kicking pettiness, it's hard to beat a guy passing a counterfeit $20 — where? To do what? To buy lemonade and cookies at a little 10-year-old girl's lemonade stand. It may be self-absorbed, but I'd add that within the last few weeks, someone walked into our garage, and stole one of my young boy's bicycle, and the other one's kid-sized drum set. They knew they were stealing from children. Hard to feature.
- Should I make a weekly This is for Phil Johnson feature? Well... this is. Mm-mm. Deep-fried spam on a stick, deep-fried bacon cheddar mashed potatoes, octopus tempura, deep-fried tootsie roll, deep-fried chocolate cake... hey, forget Phil. Some of that sounds good to me! However, I draw the line at the deep-fried live mush.
- On what planet in which universe is this a remotely good idea, let alone justice? More proof: the further you get from the Bible, the more you sympathize with genuine criminals, the less with genuine victims.
- And who could have predicted how devastating this gross miscarriage of justice in the name of "Scottish values" and "compassion" would be for the victims' surviving relatives? Answer: anyone who isn't a barking loon.
- Pastor Chris Anderson might observe that, had al-Megrahi tortured a dog or a cat, he'd still be locked up.
- Our Rachael Starke is afraid this will give husbands bad ideas.
- Call me "overprotective," but I call this an epic parenting FAIL.
- Here's another:
- WOW this would be an unhappy choice for us Californians: Senatrix Barbara "Ma'am" Boxer vs. Carly Fiorina. I was working at Hewlett-Packard while Carly was busily taking that happy, optimistic, profitable company and running it into the ground. I heard her little "talks" over the loudspeakers, blaming her problems on the employees. I got to see them walking around with slumped shoulders afterwards. Boy I hope we can do better.
- Threatened with arrest for reading the Bible in public and for offering tracts. Where? China? Iran? UAR? North Korea? Nope. England. (See also here.)
- We begin an Irony Triplet with a Sometimes Irony Can Be Pretty Ironic Alert: two Christian missionaries in the Philippines discovered a carnivorous pitcher plant that eats rats and insects. It would itself make a pretty good entry in our Isn't Evolution Wonderful? series. The irony? The plant has been named after Sir David Attenborough, who is openly contemptuous of Christianity and of the very notion that a Designer could be behind all of the intricate designs and interdependencies about which he himself narrates so eloquently, and yet so cluelessly.
- Irony Alert: last Friday, John MacArthur had an article titled Read the Gospels: JC is not PC, published in — I kid you not — The Washington Post. The "irony" part? Check the end of the article:
- Scottish irony alert: a writer argues (against the tide) that Scotland should vociferously and enthusiastically celebrate the Scottish Protestant Reformation. The irony? The author is Roman Catholic. (Thanks to Pastor Gary Benfold.)
- One more from Gary: in Great Britain, discipline your children, lose your job.
- And finally...
Posts
33 comments:
Thanks for the round-up, this morning, Dan.
Ugh... that picture of the, hmmm... the what? The deep-fried octopus waffle cone? Oh, "octopus tempura". Looks very... lively, like it might start to wiggle while you eat it.
What a time-saver! Now I don't need breakfast ;0)
Julie
I hope these neighbors realize they can be charged with assault even though it's only paint ball.
CR -
My husband would laugh out loud at that. "So, reckless endangerment is just a little nothing, but serving the community by creatively marking the offenders so as to warn others is a crime....mmmHMMM."
And that is why I worry. :)
And Dan, do you mean to say both my husband and I were at HP the same time you were???? He was there from around '91 to 2001 (first in DMO and then Americas IT) and I was there from 94 to 2001. We both got laid off within three months of eachother just before our first daughter was born. I used to say that Carly took our livelihood and our car, but she kindly let me keep my husband.
I worked sort of around her inner circle, and I do think she'd make a formidable campaigner, which, ahem, as we all know, only gets you so far. There was that one talk about "doubling down" that would not bode well...
Sounds like. I worked at the Roseville HP from something like 2000-2004 (without looking at my resume). Then IT support was outsourced first to India, then Canada.
Rachael,
No, I just meant if they actually shoot the paintballs at the cars - that's assault. I heard about this on the news. I assume their warning was not empty and they mean to fire at people.
The snake with the baby is most disturbing. One of my friends told me a story of a couple they knew who let their kid sleep with the snake. They thought the snake was sick because it was lying straight in the kid's bed. The vet said..."You better leave the snake with me." Apparently it had been measuring the kid for a meal.
Why anybody would let any animal sleep with their child at that age is beyond comprehension. I don't even let my two almost three year old sleep without a baby monitor on.
And even then, I check on her every night before I go to bed.
Just to clarify, I don't actually believe the "measuring" story...I just thought it was humurous and scary.
You guys have the snake picture all backwards. That child is clearly eating the snake.
Hm... Grim has a point.
Dan:
I looked at the Iphone apps. I have only one of them that's close. It's a flight tracker program with maps of major airports. But how can you rate it in the top 30? I like it but my wife has almost no use for it. It's only useful if you travel a lot.
Top Iphone Apps: Cardstar, Trailguru, Google, and banking program from your own bank.
BTW, you can use google calendar, contacts, and mail to sync with your Iphone. The calendar feature is great because you can share your calendar with others and vice versa. Now my wife can add to my schedule and we can see each other's.
Indeed, Grim. I thought I'd never say this...but It's all fun and games until somebody gets hurt.
Love Obama's self-portrait!
I guess it's an accurate portrait since he's God's partner in matters of life and death.
By the way the octupus thing is disgusting. Just thought I should say that.
Sir Aaron,
ALmost three...baby monitor...you got issues dude.
I sure hope you don't end up with Carly. My husband is a victim of her HP tenure. As a former California girl (3rd generation!) I would hate to see her do to California what she did to a once-great company.
My best friend, the best man in my wedding, has that Rambo lunchbox. Note the verb tense. He found shortly after college when he was visiting his parents, and started taking his lunch to work in it. I believe he was inspired by my He-Man lunchbox, which I found complete with thermos and action figure (which quickly assumed a rightful place on our shelf with the Dinobots and Voltron). Sadly, my lunchbox was too moldy, and was never used again.
The wing-walking kid actually doesn't seem that bad. The way he was strapped into that harness, he wasn't going anywhere. Real wing-walking, yeah, that would be bad. The way they did it just seems like a real windy seat.
Back when I had cable, there was this show on Discovery I'd occasionally see while waiting for Mythbusters, about burglars and their techniques. One of the things they talked about that caught me off guard was how thieves routinely steal toys and kid clothes. They have families to support, after all, and why not grab stuff for your kids while you're in there? I guess I had always thought of burglars as single guys taking stuff for the money. Never really occurred to me that they would be stealing to give to their wives and kids. I can't help but wonder whether their families know what they're doing, how they justify it, etc. What kind of thought goes into stealing a toy to make your kid happy, knowing it will violate someone else's kid. Depravity does weird things.
The Obama is justifiably outraged that we would, for some strange reason, think he would use tax money to pay for abortions. Why would we ever think he'd do something like that? I mean, he let the Mexico City policy survive for, like, three whole days before deciding to allow tax money to fund baby slaughter all over the world. Truly amazing restraint on his part. And why would we think he's push the elderly and disabled towards death? Oh, that. Well. I guess maybe it's not the outrage that's justifiable, but the fear that he'd do exactly what his track record suggests.
Yep, Daryl...probably. I think part of it comes from the horde of articles, magazines, etc. that recommend making your home into a plastic bubble. Rather than do that, my wife and I just monitor where our child is every second.
I totally saw that "gay Christian" link right after reading the article the other day...
LOVE the baby with the snake FAIL and the paintball sign :-)
Before I scrolled down far enough to see the circled-in-red "Good News for Gays" thing in the MacArthur clipping, I assumed that the irony of the thing was MacArthur's article ending with a great verse on humility followed immediately after by "MacArthur has a gigantic church and has written more best selling books than most of you will ever read." *ducks*
Fun round up Dan!
You should do a post on what the top 10 books you've read so far in 2009. I'd be interested to hear.
The octopus thingy looks very Japanese; we saw stuff like that, only, flatter.
I guess you could fix that kid-snake thing by putting the snake on a stick...
1. From the Newsweek-reporter-turned-abortion-witness article:
Abortion may be a simple procedure medically, but it is not cancer surgery [emphasis mine]. It's an elective procedure that no one—neither its defenders nor its detractors—expects to elect for themselves. I had (and still have) difficulty understanding my own reaction, both relieved to have watched a minimally invasive surgery [emphasis mine] and distressed by the emotionality of the process. Abortion involves weighty choices that, depending on how you view it, involve a life, or the potential for life. And my reaction, complicated and conflicted as it was, may have been a reflection of our national ambivalence about a private medical procedure at the center of a very public debate.[emphasis mine]
Doesn't that sound like some topical high school essay/term paper to you? It's the tone, and it bothers me. Abortion unlike cancer surgery? I'd say not (although to some, babies may be worse than cancers). Abortion a minimally invasive surgery? That depends on who you ask--the mother? Or the child? (But then again, dead babies tell no tales.) The reporter's reaction possibly a reaction toward our national ambivalence about a private procedure in a public debate? I'm not even going to try to decipher that one.
More thoughts later, perhaps.
Back...but not for long....
1a. I hope that Newsweek reporter will one day snap out of that pseudo-objective stupor and realize that there is really no way for her to remain balanced on this issue. That would take the Lord's doing, however.
2. You think that octopus thing is disgusting, CR? I think it looks cool in a funky sort of way. (I wouldn't mind eating it, either, as long as it's cooked well. Perhaps it's because I've eaten [and even enjoyed!?] worse things than that. [Does that make me a cohort of Phil's??] And Chopstickchan's right--it does look very Japanese.)
3. That is the cutest Jed I Knight ever!! It reminds me of a friend in high school who had a very stately-sounding European last name (think along the lines of nobility) and who supposedly wanted to name his future son "Lord". But wait--it only gets worse. In college I met someone whose last name was Choy (I think that's how he spelled it)--this guy once said he wanted to name his son "Bok". FAIL!!!
4. Obama's not painting a self-portrait...he's painting the Turin Shroud!!!
(4a. Here's the reference to #4 above.)
5. I just found out this morning that my friend's young cousin died in a car accident this past week due to some reckless driver (who later fled the scene). If paintballs can wake up these irresponsible people, I'd say, "Why not??" (As long as it doesn't hurt the occupants of the vehicle, of course.) Somebody ought to teach them a lesson that they'll never forget.
Susan,
em em, um, yeah, the Octupus thing is disgusting!!!
To each is own, glad you think it is "yummy." Vomit...:=)
Don't know if you know this Susan, but on the famous video Silent Scream - the doctor that performed the abortion for that video, stopped doing abortions. I don't know if he ever got saved, but I'm not surprised that the reporter didn't get phased.
You have to understand, the abortionists performing this procedure make it as normal as possible. For example, let's say they want to pull the head out, they don't say, "got the head and I'm snatching it out." They say, got "A", pulling out "B" or at least that's the code language the doctor explained in Silent Scream.
Not sure if people know where the name Silent Scream came. But just in case, you obviously can't hear the babies scream. But they show the soundogram of the abortion coming and while you can't hear him screaming, you can see terror in his face as the clamps are trying to snatch the baby.
And then there is of course, this
Jed I Knight?
I went to high school with London and Brook Lynn Bridges. They were twins.
No lie.
LOL on the names. I wonder how much thought went into choosing those names?
CR: Good link...but I got disgusted reading some of the comments. Unjust war vs. abortion discussion?! Some people are just boneheaded.
The octopus mush thing was really, really gross. Thank you, Daniel. And to think it's almost lunch time, which I just might have to skip.
The panda shot almost made up for it.
DJP,
A coworker sent this to me and it sounded like you'd find it amusing, at least. Common sense, more like.
House Resolution 615
On Tuesday, the Senate health committee voted 12-11 in favor of a two-page amendment courtesy of Republican Tom Coburn that would require all Members and their staffs to enroll in any new government-run health plan. Yet all Democrats — with the exceptions of acting chairman Chris Dodd, Barbara Mikulski and Ted Kennedy via proxy — voted nay.
It took me less than a minute to sign up to require our congressmen and senators to drink at the same trough! Three cheers for Congressman John Fleming of Louisiana!
Congressman John Fleming (Louisiana physician) has proposed an amendment that would require congressmen and senators to take the same healthcare plan they force on us (under proposed legislation they are curiously exempt).
Congressman Fleming is encouraging people to go on his Website and sign his petition (very simple - just first, last and email). I have immediately done just that at: http://fleming.house.gov/index.html.
If Congress forces this on the American people, the Congressmen should have to accept the same level of health care for themselves and their families.
Anyway, thought you might like it.
Grace and peace,
Rhology
It's amusing because it shows a sentiment, but the reality is that the effect is nearly nill in the long term. Congress has the same health plan as I do (a federal employee). I get a choice between a bunch of private programs contracted with the Office of Personnell Management. You can pay more in premiums and get different PPO plans or go with lower premiums for HMO or HDHP plans. As insurance companies go out of business, so will the choices that government employees have...eventually with everyone in the same single payer program.
Sorry, I've been out of town for a while and did not bring my laptop, so I am late in responding.
1. I never said it looked yummy, CR. I said it looked "cool in a funky sort of way" and that I "wouldn't mind eating it...as long as [here's the qualification] it's cooked well". (Kind of boggles my mind that people would eat calamari [which sometimes includes fried tentacles] and yet be grossed out by octopus, but that's just me. Maybe it's the presentation!)
2. Also, I have never watched The Silent Scream. ("WHAT??" Yes. It's true. I am watching it now, though.) That other video CR linked to (I think Dan or someone else also linked to it before) just makes one cringe. Reminds me of the Holocaust.
(I just started watching part I of The Silent Scream, and oh, I don't think I can finish watching the film unless I cover my eyes at some parts. THAT is disgusting!!!!)
3. Update on my friend's cousin's passing: I was told this week that they actually don't know if the driver that caused the accident really knew that such a horrible thing happened as he/she left the area. Despite this new piece of information, I am still in favor of the paintball idea (or perhaps other ideas like it) since I myself almost got run over TWICE by people who sped through the intersection even though the lights on their side had already turned and stayed red. Please pray for my friend's cousin's family. From what I know, her parents are non-Christians and are devastated by her death. Thank you.
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