The Determined Homemaker

The Modern Gentleman

2012-01-28T09:31:00.000-05:00

A couple of days ago, my son went to his usual mid-week social function, a huge age-separated club with hundreds of kids... about thirty or so in his age group. He enjoys his time, learning to play team sports, doing crafts, and meeting up with all his friends. (He's a popular kid.)

On his way to pick up his coat, he realized that he had short sleeves, so he started doing that arm thing that boys and men do, showing off his muscles. Or, rather, showing off what he thinks are his muscles, bless him. He's just turned nine years old. He hasn't had the necessary testosterone kick to really develop anything noticeable. Then, suddenly and quite unexpectedly to him, this girl about his size came up to him and started hitting him.

Oh it didn't hurt, or so he said. She didn't leave bruises. But the thing is, he's learned that he must never hit a girl. I've been trying to break his toddler sister of the habit of going after him. She'll pound on him when she's angry or frustrated at me. But he never hits back. Both Daddy and I taught him that way. That was fine with him, no big deal. But then he tried to move on and she blocked his path.

He didn't want to push her. She's a girl, and he's been taught to respect girls and not manhandle them. But manhandling her would be the only way to get where he needed to go. He needed to go... my sister was waiting for him, and my husband was waiting out in the car for both of them. He knew he was late, and he was frustrated. But he would not push her out of the way. He knew that the next step was to ask an adult for help, but she wouldn't let him get to one. He felt trapped and frustrated.

But still he did not strike back, and she tired of the game and wandered off. He hurried to grab his coat and meet up with his people, apologizing for being late for all the world as if it was his fault. The incident has clearly bothered him. He's mentioned it several times.

My husband and I were at a loss when we heard the story tumble out. We don't want to teach him to hit or shove girls. But I realized that, in disarming my son for the sake of protecting young ladies, we had left him vulnerable to girls who were not ladies at all. We finally let him know that, yes, you could push aside someone blocking your path, even a girl, as long as you did not shove hard... and you could do so for the purpose of dealing with someone who blocks your path and refuses to move. That's an interim solution... I don't know what a better one would be.

Oh Feminism! You teach girls to hit boys, and justify your behavior by claiming that men do not respect women as they should. But when we women, in our positions of power, teach our men to respect women, we leave them vulnerable to the ones who hit! What are we to do? We are patiently and carefully building up the men that feminists say that they want. We are fixing all the problems that feminism was made for... fixing them at the root. We are bringing up young men who will honor and respect you, who will love and cherish you, who will value your intelligence and your ability to work independently. Men who will treat you as an equal in the business world, who won't stare at your breasts when talking to you, who won't dismiss your words just because you're female.

But instead of helping us, you're working against us. My son is a gentle soul, a real person, with dreams and wishes and an inherent human dignity. Modern Feminism will not acknowledge that human dignity. They are all too happy to beat on him, to block his path, to advance their goals. They see him as someone to compete against, someone to fight. You and I know very well that a nine-year-old boy doesn't show his muscles because he expects a girl to start hitting him. Peacocks don't spread their plumage so that the peahens will start pecking and scratching them. He did not at any time consider her to be someone to fight, someone to punch, someone to risk hurting in a testosterone-fueled brawl.

And if you want your daughters to be able to find a man who will not abuse them, who will not hit them, who will treat them with dignity and respect...
...I'd appreciate it if you teach your daughters to not fly into attacks against people who have no interest in fighting them, people who are constrained by morality to not hurt girls. Because as much as I want my son to respect women, I love him too much to leave him open and vulnerable to those who will not respect him.

The scientific argument for monogamy

2011-12-19T09:04:00.000-05:00

I've heard this one before. Have you? "Humans might be naturally promiscuous," they say. Then they bolster their opinion with, "After all, our closest ancestors are apes and monkeys, and they're promiscuous." Now what do you say in response to that? You know that men are not apes, and that we aren't supposed to act just like them. The argument against their talking point has generally taken that tack (apes also engage in rape and infanticide, and we wouldn't want to make that part of society, would we?) or simply the emotional/spiritual form (we have the ability to act beyond our instincts, it separates us from the animals, etc.), which is hard to explain to someone who doesn't think we're anything special.

So in interests of advancing a new argument to bring into the mainstream, I would like to introduce you to the Prairie Vole.

The prairie vole is a curiosity among voles because of it's monogamous behavior. It has, in fact, *very* monogamous behavior. It forms a life-long mating bond. The mated couple live together, groom each other, engage in various animal forms of affection (rather than only showing interest during mating time), and the male even helps the female nurture and raise the children. Promiscuity is very rare, mostly because the mated vole comes to dislike the very scent of other voles of the opposite sex.

Why should we care about the prairie vole? After all, doesn't the whole "we are promiscuous because apes are promiscuous" argument hedge on our similarity to apes? Well, that's the interesting thing. We share DNA with the prairie vole. Specifically, our sexual-behavior DNA is an identical strand. It has the same information, and it repeats the same number of times. Does it make a difference? Yes. When that DNA strand was fitted into a sample group of the ardently promiscuous meadow vole, they turned just as monogamous as the prairie vole.

Curious, I did a search on "prairie vole" and "homosexual". The best I could come up with was a study that showed that prairie voles formed temporary same-sex relationships under certain conditions. However, though the relationships involved shared sleeping space and some grooming, they did not mention anything about actual *sexual* behavior.

Capitalism is not one-size-fits-all

2011-09-05T12:31:00.000-04:00

"Well, we won't have any problems with the dead ones, sir."
"They'll have relatives. They always do."

The Robocop series of movies lampoons a city that is increasingly run by 'capitalism'. A far-reaching company with a pitiless CEO runs various public utilities and services, including the police department. As a result, poverty and crime reign supreme, and environmentalism has gone right out the window. It's a very funny set of movies. Unfortunately, socialists tend to take these movies as the solid truth and the danger against which they are fighting every time they ensure that the government, "not some corporation", tells you want to do.

Unfortunately, there is one basic thing that socialists seem to not understand about capitalism. Capitalism is an economic theory.

Now that sounds a bit silly, so let me explain further. Of course socialists know that capitalism is an economic theory. However, socialism is not. Or, more properly. socialism is not only an economic theory. Socialism is supposed to provide a framework for economic activity by replacing the market with a redistribution center. It is supposed to abolish property by giving it all to the government. In this way, it is much, much more than an economic theory. The socialist government is supposed to do so much more than to provide a framework within which free people can pursue happiness. Instead, full socialism must provide an economic framework, take personal responsibility for the personal welfare of all citizens, decide the proper lifestyle and employment for all citizens, and the moral framework by which the citizens act properly within the society.

It is important for socialists to understand that capitalism is not meant to fulfill all of these needs for a society. In the United States, for instance, capitalism provided the economic framework, Christianity provided the moral framework, the people took personal responsibility for their welfare, lifestyle, and employment, and a mixture of the people and Christianity provided for those who could not provide for themselves.

I have often heard liberals panic at the thought of not mandating all of these levels of society through the Federal Government, as if there was no other force in existence. They seem to believe that capitalism is meant to serve for everything, and if it doesn't, then capitalists simply believe that these other systems are unimportant.

Consider this for a moment. Suppose you have a guest visiting you, and he walks into the bathroom while you brushing your teeth. "What are you doing?" he gapes. "Moving the brush in those little circles?"
"Well, it works for me," you reply. "That's the best way to brush your teeth."
"Yes," he explains, "but it'll wreck your hair!"
This is how conservatives feel when they try to explain capitalism to liberals. The liberals seem to have no concept that (back to our analogy) you can brush your hair with different strokes than you use on your teeth, much less that you can do a far better job on both if you do not use the same method. Unfortunately, this gap in knowledge simply leads to the two talking past each other: the liberal demands to know how the poor will be cared for (this is usually the part they focus on), while the conservative is mystified as to how they got to be talking about charity instead of economic theory.

Spinning the situation

2011-07-27T22:09:00.000-04:00

My congressman sent me a "poll/survey" through the email.

Right now, Congress and the president are negotiating a solution to resolve our default crisis. If Congress does NOT vote to raise the debt ceiling, do you believe that this would be a real and serious problem?*

Yes
No
Not Sure

As a member of the Congressional Seniors Task Force, I cosigned a letter to the President this month objecting to proposed benefit changes to Social Security and Medicare as part of any deal. Do you believe that changes to benefits and cuts to Medicare and Social Security should NOT be part of a debt agreement?

Medicare and Social Security should not be cut or changed.
Cuts to Social Security and Medicare should be considered.
Not Sure

Republicans in Congress have said they are unwilling to raise any taxes, including on oil companies, corporations and the wealthy. Do you believe that closing tax loopholes or increasing revenues on corporations or millionaires should be part of a balanced approach to ending our default crisis?

Yes
No
Not Sure

This was my emailed response:

I tried to take your survey on the debt limit crisis, but I couldn't. The answers to the questions were all horribly skewed, and I couldn't pick one that came even close to my thoughts.

If Congress does not raise the debt limit, it may be a serious problem, but not nearly as serious as if we raise it with no plan to balance the budget and start paying off the debt. It's a no-brainer that you don't open a new credit card for someone who has ten of them maxed out and no plan to pay them off, but that's exactly what President Obama is asking us to do.

I do disagree with cutting Medicare and Social Security as part of this deal. That is why I supported Cap/Cut/Balance so strongly. I also strongly support a repeal of Obamacare, which will cut Medicare spending as part of its function. I have the feeling, from your record over the years, that this is not what you had in mind when you signed the agreement.... especially as Obama has already sworn to veto plans that do not include cuts to either. I sincerely hope that you are not engaging in scare tactics through an implication that Obama is trying to stop the Conservative Opposition from cutting things that they have explicitly excluded from cuts again and again.

I believe that closing tax loopholes must be accompanied by lowering taxes. I cannot agree with equating the words "tax" and "revenue", as lowering taxes in the past decades has resulted in increased revenues. In fact, I believe firmly that raising taxes at this point on our job creators will only reduce revenues. What we need now is to remove the loopholes that big business prompted legislatures to create along with new taxes and regulations, and reduce overall tax rates, so that everybody pays their fair share. It is not lost on me that the companies that contribute to Democrat politicians end up paying less at tax time. This is wrong.

Please consider this to be my response to your survey.

The Sin Lists

2011-06-28T13:14:00.000-04:00

So yet another angry group of people have decided to "refute the Bible" by printing a huge list of supposed "sins" according to the Bible in an attempt to make God look like an unreasonable idiot who doesn't deserve to be even thought about, much less followed. Unfortunately, they have outright distorted and sometimes lied about what Scripture says, so I have chosen to take their list of "sins" and explain what it's all about.

- Eating shellfish - This is one of the Old Testament rules on what creatures are and are not good to eat. However, there is no punishment listed for not holding to these rules, and they were arguably abolished in the New Testament with Peter's dream, in which God offered him "unclean" animals to eat and told him that they were now clean. I'd like to add, though, for the sake of completeness, that the animals labeled "unclean" in the OT are now known to carry an increased risk of food-borne illnesses.

- Wearing clothes made of more than one fabric - Again, this is a cultural requirement only. It has no punishment listed, and it is not labeled explicitly as "detestable" or an "abomination".

- Getting raped (this only goes for the ladies, but you can smooth things over by marrying your rapist, so…) - This one is an outright lie. The verse says that if a man *seduces* and lies with a virgin, that he can make it right by marrying her, unless her father refuses the marriage. In that case, he has to pay her three years' wages on the middle-class level. These days the payment would be approximately $180,000. Of course, seduction is not rape.

In fact, if a married woman has had sex with a man outside of the city, it is assumed that she was raped and so she merits no penalty whatsoever. The man, however, is put to death. There is no actual Biblical law regarding the punishment for rape.

However, we must remember that the Old Testament Law was a restraint, not the be-all and end-all of the country's laws. In a time when killing someone carried the punishment of your death and the death of all your friends and family, for instance, the OT law limits the punishment to the murderer. So to see what God's society did for rape, we have to look at the actual documented incidences of it. In every situation in which rape occurs, either the perpetrators were killed (sometimes very painfully) or the Bible makes it clear that their lack of punishment is in itself abhorrent. God does not treat rapists gently.

- Trimming your beard or sideburns - Cultural requirement only. It has no punishment listed, and it is not labeled explicitly as "detestable" or an "abomination".

- Getting remarried - Not according to the Old Testament, and in the New Testament it is only listed as a sin if your previous marriage was dissolved by what would now be called a "no-fault divorce".

- Planting more than one crop in a field - Cultural requirement only. It has no punishment listed, and it is not labeled explicitly as "detestable" or an "abomination".

- Having a wet dream - The term "unclean" is often misunderstood by non-Jews and non-Christians. Both Judaism and Christianity recognizes that we frequently fall short of the goal of utter righteousness. In other schools of religious thought, such as Secular Humanism, proving your own righteousness is very important. In Judaism and Christianity, it is not.

Anyways... back to uncleanliness. It is understood by Jews and Christians to be an inevitability rather than something to be avoided and feared at all costs. In addition, not all uncleanliness in the OT was a result of sin. Many times, it was a simple protection in the society. Any emission of semen made the man "unclean until evening", which was really a pretty lightweight requirement. Interestingly, the people who laugh at the Bible for requiring a man to wash his clothes after discharging semen all over himself are silent when it comes to the rules regarding diagnosis and treatment of mildew and mold in homes and clothing.

- Eating rare meat - Only meat that is rare enough to actively bleed. This had two uses. The first was hygenic... even today, we recognize that there are enough blood-borne illnesses to make drinking it a risky proposition. Secondly, the Old Testament is meant to teach humankind the importance of shed blood for forgiveness of sins, because that's the method Jesus had to use. For that reason, blood is especially sacred.

- Touching a dead animal - Cleanliness issue. The person has to wash and is "unclean until evening", meaning basically a temporary quarantine. He couldn't stick his hands inside an animal that died out in the field (this didn't refer to butchering your meat, by the way) and then proceed to knead bread for supper. Remember that the high death rate in childbirth a few centuries ago came from doctors who did not wash their hands when going from the morgue to the delivery room.

- Menstruating and/or earning your “red wings” - Issue of cleanliness, as with the semen, with an extra ritual required due to the blood, as described in the "rare meat" section. I'd like to add that the punishment for sex during menstruation was exile, not death.

- Getting a tattoo - Do not cut yourself or make marks on yourself for the dead. Whether this applies to all tattoos or just putting a permanent representation of your dead relatives on your skin is up for debate. It's also worth noting that people back then used to slash themselves with knives (and sometimes kill their own children) because they believed that their gods would not listen to them unless they suffered enough. God did not want His people developing that mindset about Him.

Hope this helps the next time someone starts spouting laws that they don't understand.

We want a king!

2011-06-20T07:40:00.000-04:00

I got onto a forum temporarily and found myself discussing Obamacare. I got the usual, nods of affirmation and extra explanations from some, while the detractors contented themselves with no better response than "you're an idiot". While I was thinking over Obamacare and what it does and doesn't do, however, I realized something startling and made a larger connection.

One of the worrying attributes of Obamacare is the incredibly large power shift from the private sector to the government. The nature of that attribute, however, deserves further study. Over and over again one man is mentioned: the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. This person, not Congress, will develop the three government-approved healthcare plans covered by the mandate, the ones I like to call "Regular, Premium, and Premium Plus". All Americans will have to have one of these three plans, purchased from one private company or another... does it matter anymore which company you use?

Consider the implications of that for a moment. Suppose the head of this department, unelected, appointed by the President, does not believe that people over a certain age should receive any care at all? Suppose he believes that we are ruining the world through overpopulation and each family should only have two children? He can decide that the mandatory health care plans do not, any of them, cover any procedures if the patient is over 80 years old. He can decide that only the first two pregnancies will be covered in any of these plans. In a way, he has a kingly power over us.

That's when it began to click for me. We were ruled by ourselves, and our economy was ruled by the natural force of Free-Market Capitalism. Now, increasingly, the vocal minority is clamoring for a "king". They are trying to give our powers and our rights, not to the Federal Government, not to Congress, but specifically to the President and his appointees. Why would they do something like that?

They distrust the free market. The free market is a force that they cannot control. If there is a bad year for tomatoes, they cannot force the price of tomatoes to fall. If they disapprove of people eating beef instead of goat meat, they cannot force the stores to sell goat meat and not beef. (I know I slip into agricultural idioms easily, bear with me please! This goes for other products and services as well.) We conservatives believe that the free market will always act in the best interests of the largest numbers of people. However, the liberals do not like it.

The Israelites felt the same way. Ruled directly by God Himself, they wanted a king. They wanted something more than a force they could not control, who might make decisions of which they disapprove. They wanted a man. God will never tell you that you are allowed to sin. A man may be coaxed to do so. Now I am not comparing God directly to the Free Market, with all the omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence that implies. However, God, like the Free Market and all laws of Nature which He created, is constant and will not reward behavior that violates His laws.

This started with the Free Market, but it can be applied to other things. The liberals who push hormonal birth control, abortion, and gay 'marriage' want sex to have no consequences. Natural law created by God says that it must, but they hope to take control and force what is wrong to become right. This requires them to reject God's laws and set up a king to rule over them instead, a man whom they hope to give the power... the power to decide what medical care we can afford to receive, the power to set the price of goods and services, the power to declare by government fiat that old borders to chastity and modesty no longer exist and anyone who supports them deserves to be hated.

This was God's warning when the Israelites demanded a king:

He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the LORD will not answer you in that day.”

We might want to keep this in mind as we see those who happily hand their medical privacy and insurance rights to a single unelected man, who seek greater power for human men, all hoping that this path will lead to their being permitted to do that which is against natural law... whether it be to receive without working or engage in acts of depravity with government approval.

What the heck, it's been a month!

2011-06-07T07:55:00.000-04:00

I love to write, and I love to write in this blog. However, I just have to come to the conclusion that I will not be able to post daily, and sometimes I might not even be able to post weekly!

On Saturday, I had the pleasure of seeing my brother marry a good woman. My house was Grand Central Station, with several people staying here rather than spending needless money on a hotel room, and several more people meeting up with them to go various places and enjoy various activities. My last houseguests leave today... and then the house will be quiet again.

Even though I am a very introverted person, I also very much enjoy sharing my house and property with other people. When we first bought this place, we felt led by none other than God to make it a pleasant place where other people could find rest. Some people become missionaries, others lead groups, others create new charities... But for every person who goes out there to make something of themselves, you need people who spread the load just a little bit further! For every adventurer, you need an oasis. My husband and I are pretty much devoting our lives to raising our children and maintaining our home in such a way that we can provide an oasis to those who just need a break.

Sometimes I feel guilty that I don't spend enough time pursuing things like writing that 'could make me money someday'. However, I have to keep reminding myself that now, as my kids are young and being homeschooled and we are providing this restful service to those who could use a break, I really am contributing enough to society as it is. The steady, frequent writing will come later.

I still have my entire middle age and elderly years ahead of me.

Benefits without Benefits

2011-05-09T12:15:00.001-04:00

I stumbled across an oldie but goodie while reading a discussion of gay marriage. One of the people referred back to this Family Research Center writeup, citing numerous studies and statistics to call into doubt the notion that the typical homosexual relationship is basically just like the typical heterosexual one.

This leads me back to an old SSM argument which claims that being able to legally marry will stabilize gay relationships, and the main reason why gays are so promiscuous and so many of their relationships are so short-lived is because they don't receive the state benefits. Frankly, the early information on the length of gay marriages in countries and states that permit them are not promising.

Gay activists like to pull race into the mix, comparing any disapproval at all with homosexual sex with the kind of racism that once enslaved an entire people. I'd like to pull in the racist angle and give it a bit of a twist.

When blacks were enslaved, they had no rights. They had no legal standing. Nevertheless, they married each other all the time. On 'friendlier' plantations, the master would oversee a pretty little ceremony. On less friendly places, they would hold their ceremonies quietly, but they still married and were given in marriage.

Now when I say that blacks have no rights, I should remind my readers that this went far beyond simply lacking tax status. They had no inheritance, because they could not own property. Furthermore, a master was fully able to sell the wife away from the husband, or their children away from their parents. The environment was not simply unfriendly to marriage among the black slaves. It was downright hostile.

And yet despite this, the marriages prospered. When slavery first ended and the Civil Rights era began, the family values of the black culture put white culture to shame. Marriages lasted.

It is clear to me that the simple legal acknowledgement of a relationship as "marriage" is not what lends stability. Marriage is a term that is not so much defined as derived. It is the inherent qualities of marriage, the hormonal/chemical/physical/emotional/psychological workings of a sexually exclusive, opposite-sex couple that makes marriage what it is. Slapping the label on a group known for their promiscuity and short-term relationships will not transform them into upstanding pillars of family values.

So much for resolutions...

2011-02-22T08:58:00.000-05:00

Of course I haven't posted in a while now. It seems that "real life" continues to intervene! For today, I have a piece that I wrote in response to a forum thread. The conversation shifted to various economic responses to various tax cuts and government spending.

The first gem was the reminder that the "Clinton Surplus" was created by a Republican Congress and finally passed after Clinton stonewalled it so hard that the entire government shut down for several weeks. In this post, I went into the reasons behind the recent economic problems and their results.

This is what happened in 2006:

Shortly after the Democrats swept Congress, there was a bursting of a gas bubble. Not a physical bubble, but an economic one. Refinery problems plus Middle East concerns plus an increased integration of ethanol worked together to bring gas prices up. Food prices followed quickly. Whenever gas prices go up, food prices go up, because grocery stores work on a shoestring budget. They make almost no profit. So when it costs more to transport food to the store, the items cost more.

Now in 1977, the Community Reinvestment Act was passed by a Democrat majority Congress and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter. The CRA had good intentions... to end the practice of redlining, or refusing to sell homes in certain areas to minorities. However, it basically involved sending the government into real estate to enact something very much like Affirmative Action. It didn't impact us much, though, for nearly 20 years, because it didn't have much teeth.

That changed under President Clinton, who empowered Reno to set things into motion that would punish banks that didn't make enough loans to minorities who wanted to buy homes. The only problem was that the reason why fewer minorities were buying homes was because fewer minorities had the financial means and acumen to hold down a mortgage. The banks were ordered to make it work somehow, and the bank response was the Subprime Mortgage.

The Subprime Mortgage, like the Saltbox and the SUV, was something created by private industry trying to keep what they wanted/needed while skirting Federal regulations. In all three cases, you ended up with something that didn't have all of the advantages of what the government wanted to force or what the private groups originally used. (The SUV is a replacement for the Station Wagon that not only fails to meet sedan fuel economy, but it fails to approach station wagon fuel economy as well. The Saltbox has a partial upper story with a roof that drops to the first story on one side, resulting in a loss of useable space.)

These subprime loans were snapped up by people for whom they were and were not originally intended, creating a heavy demand for new and expensive housing. People who would have been steered towards a starter home were using subprimes to afford twice the house they would have purchased otherwise. We had a housing bubble. W Bush sounded the alarm multiple times, but Frank and Dodd staunchly refused to look into it. All of these subprime home owners were barely managing to make their finances work, and the slightest rise in any of their other bills would lead to disaster.

Then, of course, as mentioned above, the oil price went up. That started a comprehensive collapse that ended in failing banks, foreclosures/abandonments, and rampant unemployment in the construction industry. Unfortunately, instead of isolating this disaster and allowing it to burn itself out, Obama decided to ramp up federal spending, and now it's affecting private sectors that had nothing to do whatsoever with construction or mortgages.

And now the fix, being basically the "You still have to provide mortgages for minorities whether they can afford them or not, but you can't do it this way", is making it nigh impossible for smaller businesses to operate through lack of liquidity. The government we-can't-allow-banks-to-fail mindset has brought to a full stop the natural process of stronger banks buying weaker ones and fixing the problems naturally. Did you know that, at the beginning of the recession, if you had been saving up a little money during the good times, you could have any home renovation done well on the cheap? Before Obama intervened in hopes of getting people to refinance their mortgages, refinancing was easy and very useful. We did it ourselves. Now it's all but impossible unless you fit the narrow and confusing government standards.

Gas prices also started to fall as demand fell, but now the weak dollar plus inflation (both the result of government spending) kept prices up and are now primarily responsible for the current spike. Of course, every part of this, from an end to free checking (next month, I believe, part of Obamacare) to the 50-100% rise in basic food prices, to the tightening of loans and resulting unemployment, is impacting primarily the poor and the middle class.

In short, the particular Democrats who swept Congress in 2006 (aside from Dodd/Frank and other members of the Old Guard) really were no more responsible for the beginning of the recession than W Bush was for the tech bubble burst and 9/11. It's what they've done with it since that has landed us in the Pit of Despair.

Responsibility for education

2011-02-02T14:33:00.000-05:00

In Florida, a State Representative has proposed increasing parental involvement in childhood education by having public school teachers grade the parents. Of course, there are many angles in describing the problems with this proposal. A friend of mine who is a Florida-certified to teach and knows the local public schools told me that the parents should be the ones grading the teachers.

On the plus side, the proposal does address a problem that is very real in today's society. Too many parents don't have enough involvement in their children's education. The question in my mind is, will this proposal solve or worsen the problem? I believe that it is a treatment of a symptom rather than the ending of a societal disease.

In Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, young Scout does not take easily to school. Her teacher is appalled when she discovers that Scout knows not only how to read, but how to write cursive. Her father has spent so much time reading with her in the evenings, and her housekeeper copied out words for her to practice when she wanted something to do. The teacher is adamant that this is wrong.

"Now you tell your father not to teach you any more. It's best to begin reading with a fresh mind. You tell him I'll take over from here and try to undo the damage-"
"Ma'am?"
"Your father does not know how to teach. You can have a seat now."

This book was published in 1960 and referred to the rise of new teaching methods including the much-lampooned "New Math" in public school systems. The adjoining message, naturally, was that these methods would be compromised if all these parents kept thinking that they could do the job of teaching their children how to learn. The movement coincided with the Feminist Movement, which championed pushing mothers, against their will if necessary, to leave their child-rearing and climb the career ladder.

Combine these two together and you have, nurtured for about 50 years by the Liberal Left, the belief that it is the job of parents to work outside the home while leaving the matter of their children's education in the hands of government officials and "properly-trained" instructors. I note that one of the biggest questions I hear as a homeschooling mother is, "How do you know that you're qualified to teach your child?" Before the '60's and its various revolutions, such a question would have been downright laughable. Who is better qualified to teach a child than the people whose genetics created him or her?

Of course, as with many such reforms, we are now discovering that parental involvement does in fact have a strongly positive effect on a child's education. What is the solution? Although Representative Stargel is listed as a Republican, she offers the very liberal proposal that the Government, having discouraged parents from involvement, must now mandate parental involvement for the exact same reason... the good of the children. This is worse than the purported ambulance-in-the-valley solution for the lack of fence on the dangerous cliff. This is tantamount to removing an already-present fence on the cliff before instituting the ambulance in the valley.

Becoming Rich Pt. 2

2011-01-28T10:59:00.000-05:00

In my last post, I discussed the first of a couple of principles that will aid you in the process of becoming rich. The second is like it, and is best described in Heinlein's book, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. The principle is known as "TANSTAAFL", said as one oddly-pronounced word. It is an acronym that stands for "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch."

What does this mean for the person who is becoming rich? Simply this: Aside from a very few insanely lucky people, it will not happen quickly, and it will not happen without effort. Get-quick-rich schemes either depend on such vanishing statistical chance that they cannot in any way be depended upon, or require of you a price that you may not realize that you are about to pay.

I was tempted by offers of a $1,000 or even $2,000 shopping spree at a national electronics chain. All I had to do was to sign up for a certain number of free or almost-free offers. It was easy money, wasn't it? Not necessarily. I knew from the experiences of others that you would have to remember, personally, to cancel the various offers before you had anywhere from nine to fifteen companies charging you $10-20/month for their services. Actually getting these offers canceled is often a real pain, because many of these companies are less than scrupulous. They will take up your time trying to convince you to stay, and then mysteriously lose your cancellation paperwork to get everything out of you that they can. These offers also often involve you signing away the right for them to sell your information to other companies. One of these shopping sprees can result in a huge overflow of junk mail for years to come.

In other words, the price for the offer was my privacy, along with a great deal of time and energy that in retrospect would be more burdensome than simply finding a job that paid $20/hr and working full-time for about a week and a half. TANSTAAFL.

I have a third principle, and liberals will not want to believe this one, because it undercuts their preferred form of aid to the poor. The principle is this: Spend the money that you earned. Earn the money that you spend. This will aid you greatly in becoming rich.

When people do manage to 'hit the jackpot' and become rich quick, it is almost always temporary. Give them a few weeks to a few years, depending on the dollar amount, and they will be just as poor as before. I have heard it said that if wealth was collected and distributed utterly equally, both property and money, within a generation all the wealth would be back where it was. Why is this?

Human beings value things based on the cost to acquire them. When your riches come to you by your own efforts, you are more likely to be careful with them. If you spent five hours digging ditches to get your check, you are less likely to toss it away on frivolities. Money in and of itself has no value. It's cotton and linen and dyes. The number stamped on it is more or less an arbitrary marking. The reason why it has value to you is because it represents those hours of sweat and aches, and it can be exchanged for a good meal and soft, safe place to sleep.

When people receive money through no effort of their own, through winning a huge prize or being handed it readily by faceless government officials, the money does not represent their hard work. It does not represent hours spent out in the sun, or days of frustrating problem-solving. It has little or no value, and the riches they purchase also mean little to them. What if your television breaks? Buy another! Break it out of pique and buy another! It cost you no effort. It cost you no pain, no determination, no struggle.

Now there are exceptions. Some people who win the lottery do manage their money wisely. Some people who receive aid do invest and use it wisely. By the great majority, however, you should not wish for instant riches if you want to become rich. You should wish instead for the slow and steady path, for the accumulation over years, for the knowledge that every time you are knocked down, you can get back up and start again on the path to becoming rich. Becoming rich, like aging fine wine, is more about the process than the result.

My own family is following this path.We have had downturns and upturns, but over all we are on a slow but steady path to the Middle Class. We take care of the things we own, because they cost us dearly in time and effort to accumulate. We save when we can, spend when we must, and reduce where we can. I used to think that it would be wonderful to win the lottery or suddenly have our mortgage debt randomly forgiven. Now I am beginning to see that such 'blessings' may turn out to be a curse. When we have won our way, we will do so by our own efforts, with our own skills, and our wealth will mean something to us.

May it be for everyone. Then everyone can become truly rich.

Becoming Rich

2011-01-26T09:18:00.000-05:00

Thomas Sowell has an excellent article up today about rich people and how they got that way. This is not going to be the exact topic of my post today, but it's worth a read.

I learned a lot from my uncle, my mother's sister's husband. Though he is not related to me by blood, he might as well be. One of the few solidly INTJ people in the world, like me, he was able to help me understand how people like me can move through the world without breaking us... or it. One of the most important things he taught me was how to become rich.

Now, I chose my words very carefully. "Becoming" rich is not the same as "being" rich. The method doesn't guarantee any particular measure of wealth in any particular time. It merely ensures that you will remain on the road of improvement, and you will be better off than the way that you were.

These days, advice about life and work tends to be the kind of advice you'd expect from a very wealthy society. "Find out what makes you happy. Settle for nothing less." That is all very well and good when all businesses are booming and the world is full of friendly bosses just looking for the next CEO. Such environments, though, are historically very rare and unusual, existing only in small parts of the world for mere years or decades at a time. You can't rely on them, especially in this economy.

Of course it's a good thing to find out what makes you happy and strive towards it. Rush Limbaugh encourages his listeners to find what makes you happy and then find out how to make money doing it. He cites that as the secret to his success. It's not the only secret, though, and it is not the most important if what you want is to become rich.

Now let me explain my terms once again. People hear the phrase "become rich" and they think that you're automatically talking about turning from minimum-wage poverty to, well, Rush Limbaugh wealthy. Not everybody is going to do that. Not everybody actually wants it, no matter what they think. By the time I'm done explaining this, you'll understand why. However, if you are in dire straits, you do not have to become rich for your entire life. You only have to do it until you are closer to where you want to be.

The first principle to becoming richer is to do anything (within moral standing) that will get you paid. Nowadays there are too many young people who believe that a certain job is beneath them. They graduate with big-sounding degrees, and they've learned to believe that they should only have to work within their specialty. You can't have this mindset if you want to become richer. If you are searching for a job, you should be willing to take what comes your way. My father has worked as an electronics technician, a system designer, a laser builder... and a carpenter for a cabinet company.

My uncle has told me that he has trouble understanding why some people claim that they are just plain unable to get a job. He taught me that you can get a job as long as you're willing to do anything for pay and let enough people know about it. It may be dirty and unpleasant. You may be digging ditches, or working in a factory. Still, it will be work, and you will get paid. There will be times in your life when that will be the most important thing you can do just to keep yourself and your family going.

Now once you've got that job, you can work your way up. You can find out what you enjoy and try to make money doing it. But the first step is to simply get a job, any job that will feed you, or at least help you make ends meet. You may have to lower your expectations, especially in a poor economy. You may have to lower your standard of living for a time. If you want to survive, however, there will be times in your life when you simply have to take what you can get. That dirty, tiring job should be viewed, not as a disgrace, but as the beginning of your rise.

Taxing Riches

2011-01-24T22:07:00.001-05:00

What tipped the scales for me when I voted for John McCain in the 2008 election? Certainly his appointment of Sarah Palin, a mother of five who bought diapers at Walmart and wasn’t afraid to hunt for food, helped his case. I am a conservative mother, and I identify with her. However, the real decision was made during the debate hosted by Rick Warren in which McCain refused to set an arbitrary dollar amount as the dividing line between rich and poor.

“Some of the richest people I've ever known in my life are the most unhappy,” he said, following Obama’s description of ‘rich’ as making $250K/year. “I think that rich should be defined by a home, a good job, an education and the ability to hand to our children a more prosperous and safer world than the one that we inherited.” The important part, however, the part that I wish all conservatives would memorize, is his next sentence:

“I don't want to take any money from the rich — I want everybody to get rich.”

I have realized that this was one of the greatest reasons why I staunchly oppose the liberal mindset. The liberals have set up “the rich” in order to bear the burden of their great society, built by directing cash flow from the producers to the non-producers in defiance of all the laws of nature. In setting up “the rich” for this burden, they must first define “the rich”, and every attempt to do so has led to disaster.

In this Great Recession, I have been lucky. My husband has not been laid off. However, we were notified last week that all employees in the company were going to undergo a temporary salary reduction. For whatever reason, they cannot bear the costs during this quarter. Their clients, however, cannot bear the drop in productivity. What was first going to be recompense as paid vacation is now going to be delivered to us as a bonus at the beginning of the next quarter.

As soon as I heard this, I groaned. I also used to work full-time, and the very first thing I learned regarding my salary was to never take accumulated vacation time as a monetary bonus. As soon as I heard the word ‘bonus’, I immediately knew that nearly half of the temporarily-docked pay would be lost to us for the rest of the year. Why?

Somewhere along the line, someone decided that the rich get bonuses. Therefore, bonus tax withholding should be calculated differently. Bonuses are taxed at a flat percentage, regardless of your financial situation. Once Social Security and other taxes are added on, you invariably find yourself with only about half of the original amount. Of course, the rich can weather a blow like this. A lower-middle-class family has very little stretch in the monthly budget, and paying back only half of a salary reduction puts a very real strain on the finances.

State luxury taxes provide a similar problem. By defining certain activities and property as ‘rich’, luxury taxes become a self-fulfilling prophecy, lifting these activities and property out of the reach of the middle class who may be willing to sacrifice in other areas of their lives in order to enjoy just one of these ‘luxuries’. The idea is the same; the liberals have decided that use of a certain good or service defines you as ‘rich’, and they who claim to bring opportunity to the poor end up forbidding it.

Property tax is yet another method by which those who define ‘rich’ end up snaring the poor and middle class. I live in a rural area, in which you will hear the phrase “Land-rich, money-poor”. This is not by any means a new problem. Property tax was a very early method of funding the government. It too, however, defines someone as ‘rich’, this time by looking at the size of their house or land. The New England Saltbox is an architectural design created in order to reduce taxes in a time when your house value was calculated by how many floors were in your home. By extending the roofline to the top of the first floor on one side of the house (usually the back), builders created the look and usefulness of a two-story house that was taxed as one. Measures like this were necessary for some families. Wealth is not the only reason to own a large house. The families with many children, typically poorer than the average, are hit hardest by large house taxes. Farmers are hit hardest by property tax determined by acreage.

As time goes on, I realize more and more the folly of a tax system that targets the "rich", due to the problems that arise from defining the line between "rich" and "poor". I am beginning to believe that perhaps the only method of taxation that can encourage growth and wealth is a flat income or sales tax percentage across the board.

Setting the record straight

2011-01-21T08:48:00.000-05:00

One of the plagues of the Internet is that anyone can be an expert on anything. Some sites are better at vetting their content than others. Unfortunately, "about.com" is not one of them. Oh, there are good articles on the site. If you trawl through enough trash, you will almost always find something valuable. As my readers have probably guessed, it is part of that 'trash' that irks me today.

I'm here to set the record straight.

The article purported to be a review of the computer game Sims 3, written by someone who seems to have played the game for all of ten minutes and may not have even had a legal copy. That's a serious charge to make, I am aware. Why would I make it? The review was dated in December of 2010 and gave the game a low score for world customization. The reviewer claimed that the game did not even give you the object placement options of Sims 2. He (or she, as the case may be) did acknowledge that there is a tool on the Sims 3 website called "Create-A-World", but he had never touched it, so he was not including it in his review.

Something that sets Sims 3 apart from previous Sims games is its updating feature. Other Sims games did deliver patches and updates, but none of the updates ever included any new content. They largely addressed bugs and issues. In Sims 3, however, if all you purchase and own is the vanilla game, the updates will give you a few of the new abilities included in the expansion packs. The update that came out with Sims 3 World Adventures allowed you to build basements, even if you did not purchase adventures. The update for Ambitions gave your sim a few extra personality traits, such as "Vehicle Enthusiast", which gives your sim extra happiness if his car is a particularly nice one. Now here is the important part when dealing with the faulty review: Sims 3 Late Night was released in late October, and its corresponding update allowed us to add and delete lots and objects. In other words, it gave us the exact same functionality as we had in Sims 2, and anyone who had installed and registered/updated a genuine copy of the vanilla game in December of 2010 would have seen it.

Secondly, it was a really bad move to give Sims 3 a low score for world customization without even looking at the Create-A-World tool, especially if the writer is going to complain about the worlds being less customizable than in Sims 2. He should have either included the tool in his review or not commented on the world creation features. In Sims 2, there was no Create-A-World tool. Instead, you were able to work with the terrain and road placement only if you owned a copy of Simcity 4, and your custom neighborhood only imported properly if you followed exactly a rather capricious set of rules. The "city" had to be of a certain size, and anything in it had to follow certain rules of placement. Of course, Simcity 4 was not free, meaning that any neighborhood customization aside from placing trees and lots required you to spend an extra $30-50.

Sims 3 Create-A-World, on the other hand, is a free tool downloaded from the website. It is designed to work with Sims 3, so it is very good at vetting its worlds and ensuring that they will import easily and accurately. It also is a true world-builder, in which you can start with either a height map or a plain stretch of land and add every single thing included in any proper Sims 3 world. It provides you with terrain sculpting, painting, routing information, object placement, road placement, lot placement, and even collectible object spawners. It runs a streamlined version of Sims 3 in which you can do lot-building that remains in the world, allowing you to release something just as complete and sophisticated as the worlds that come with the game, minus the actual Sim families residing in the actual houses.

Basically, with Sims 3 Create-A-World, Sims 3 worlds become far more customizable than Sims 2 ever had, and with the late October update, even the vanilla Sims 3 game provides you with the customizing capability of Sims 2.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to make my own world... let's have a mountain here and a beachfront over here...

How do you love your enemies?

2011-01-19T12:20:00.000-05:00

I read a frustrated person's question this morning. The topic was a common topic these days: the Arizona shooting and the question of civility in politics. I have heard questions like this one before, and decided that I'd best address it. The question is basically, "How are we supposed to love someone like Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama?"

It would be all too easy to do as the rest of the world, most of which would excuse someone for hating the person who already shows unreserved hatred for you. That is because of the "Golden Rule", a twisted and misunderstood belief that "treat others as you would like to be treated" means that harsh treatment of others can be justified by their actions towards you. In today's bizarre morality, you are vindicated for being a jerk to a jerk.

God, however, asks for something grander and deeper. He asks for us to treat others as you would like to be treated, regardless of the way they treat you. He wants us to learn to love our enemy and do good to those who hate us. What does that mean for us today? Some say that we cannot say anything unkind or express any dissatisfaction with those with whom we disagree. Yesterday, on a popular radio show, the host was told that he was not being Christlike when he railed against the actions of Obama or Pelosi. However, Jesus referred to the Pharisees as "whitewashed graves" and "brood of vipers". What does this mean?

Jesus has always had a heart for the lost sinner. During His time on this earth, He was not ashamed to pardon tax collectors and prostitutes. He raised up the fallen, gave rest to the weary, and was gentle to the humble. However, He reserved some pretty choice words for the religious/political leaders who were leading His people astray. Given that, it is hard to believe that Jesus would never have us speak out against oppression, evil, and sin.

So what does it mean to love someone to whom you are politically opposed?

The next time you start to rail against Obama or Pelosi, keep track of your language and what you say. Are you wishing them harm, directly? Or are you wishing for an end to their harmful actions towards you? Are you mocking them to tear them down, or are you hoping that they will listen and turn? What are your motives? It is all too easy to turn human men and women into demons in your own mind. The best of us have a bit of the Devil in them, and the worst of us have a bit of God in them.

I wrote a post earlier this month doubting Obama's Christianity. Nobody could say that I am sweet and easy on him or Pelosi, whom I have accused of terrible ills. However, I can say truly that I would not wish violence or suffering on either of them. I would, in my anger, wish that Obama was impeached or that Pelosi decided to retire. I would speak out strongly against what they are doing to this country. I can do this without holding actual hatred in my heart for either of them.

Ask yourself this: If Obama had a sudden turning-around, if he suddenly experienced a revival of Christian thought and deed, if he eschewed his hateful language and swore to do better, if he apologized for his actions and sought your forgiveness, would you give it to him? Of course you might be cautious at first. So would I. But if he earnestly sought to undo the harm and his apology was genuine, would you hold back due to your anger with him? Would you refuse forgiveness so that you could see him suffer? Or would you welcome him gladly and rejoice that one more has been recovered?

To those who ask how to keep from hating Obama and Pelosi, I say this: First, do not wish them harm in your anger. Do not wish for a creatively painful death for them. Do not call any diseases or medical conditions upon them. I say this doubly to the Christians, because our words may have power and we are responsible for that power.

Secondly, be certain in your heart that you would accept them willingly should they repent and return. I'm using religious language here for a political process, so let me be clear... your fellow Christian is your brother or sister even if he or she disagrees with your politics. My point is that, whether it be politics or religion, any hesitation to welcome them in should be borne only of caution, and not a desire for revenge or refusal to forgive.

Equality of what, exactly?

2011-01-18T14:45:00.001-05:00

I am a member of the Ladies Against Feminism group. As such, I have joined their Facebook page and often read and reply to the people there. I wanted to take one of my answers today and expand it for the edification for anyone who reads this blog.

One self-proclaimed feminist wrote the following (excerpt): "A real feminist believes women should have all the same choices as men do. However, the fact that most people who do choose to stay at home are women obviously says something. it cannot in every case be a choice or else 50% of stay at home parents would be men."

Now this falls into an error that feminists and liberals (the two groups often overlap) both follow. This error is defining equal opportunity as equal outcomes.

This nation was created in order to give each of us equal opportunity, and it has historically succeeded admirably. Anyone is allowed to start their own business. Anyone is allowed to work his way up, to find a way to pay for higher education, to transcend the social and economic class into which he.. or she.. was born. If you have a dream, America is the place to be. You will have no better luck in any other country.

Now of course, all human beings have different dreams. Many dream of simply having a safe, comfortable life. Some want to invent something new. Others want to heal anyone they can help. Still others simply want to accumulate wealth. It is a delight to me to ask people what they dream of doing and encourage them to take steps towards that end. I know one young man who merely wants to be the best teacher of history, the one who gives untold students a love for knowledge of the past. I knew one middle-aged woman, a data entry worker, who wished she was repairing, refurbishing, and selling antique furniture on Long Island. Walk down any street and understand that those houses hide (or display, depending on the house) all sorts of fascinating professions and hobbies. I've seen an entire basement taken up by a beautifully intricate, lifelike model railroad running its tracks through mountainous villages and a miniature city. I married the son of the man who invented the Auto-Reverse for the cassette tape deck.

What's my point? Well, if each person is a dynamic, living person with hopes and dreams, then not everyone is going to have the same dream and not everyone is going to have the same hope. Not everyone will want to be a doctor, and not everyone will want to be a carpenter. The last thing I would expect from equal opportunities is equal outcomes, because not everyone values the same things. One person will be utterly happy with a part-time job, an old trailer, and the ability to take three-hour walks daily. Another will prize money over time. Yet another will gladly give up all his money to be surrounded by children. If we are forced to have equal outcomes, we cannot have equal opportunity.

Back to our feminist talker of the day. "It cannot in every case be a choice or else 50% of stay at home parents would be men," she asserts. Is this true? A Pew research poll in 2007 showed that only 21% of full-time working mothers and 16% of stay-at-home mothers believe that full-time work is ideal for them. On the other hand, 72% of working fathers believe that working full-time is the best situation for them. Why would someone believe that equal opportunity to make your own choice would result in a 50/50 split of homemaker men and women, when over 70% of fathers prefer to work full-time and about 20% of mothers prefer the same?

Personally, ideally, I would think that equal opportunity would result in 100% of working mothers feeling that full-time work is ideal for them, and 0% of the stay-at-home mothers feeling that full-time work is ideal for them. Of course, we don't live in an ideal world, and, as our feminist of the day pointed out, not everyone has the ability to choose what he or she prefers in the area of homemaking versus working outside the home. So what should be done to make that choice more available?

Most feminists believe that more women should be pushed out of the homemaking sphere, by force if necessary, in order to ensure that they have equality through equal outcomes. I believe that equality comes through opportunity, and that true choice will result in the majority of women feeling that they are in their ideal situation. Given that 84% of stay-at-home women are in their ideal situation and only 21% of working mothers feel the same way, my analysis is that any method of coercion, any oppression of choices, is happening due to the feminist 'remedy'.

Bread and milk runs

2011-01-17T13:59:00.000-05:00

This week, we're going to have nasty winter weather almost every day except for today. That means that today I had to go out and do our shopping. Unfortunately, anyone in the New England area (and surrounding) can tell us exactly what I ran into... the Bread and Milk Runs.

Now this is a Northern phenomenon that happens whenever winter weather is expected. People flock to the stores to prepare by buying extra supplies in the necessities, usually milk or bread.

I dislike being rushed in the grocery store. I don't like being swarmed. It's not easy at all to wait in a long line with an eight-year-old and a toddler. So how do I avoid the bread and milk runs?

I know that some people live in very small apartments and can't put this into effect. I grew up among the "land-rich money-poor", and my parents have always had a cellar, as have the parents of most of my childhood acquaintances. It was considered normal to put up a couple of shelf sets and store extra food down there where it was cool and reasonably dry.

I only have one shelf set and I need another. Still, I do have a space down in the cellar which is used exclusively for extra food. I keep on hand enough food to have a varied and pleasant diet for at least a week and a half, and enough to just plain eat for at least two months. I never had it any other way, so I don't know what it's like to have it any other way.

If it's at all possible for you, I would recommend that you my readers keep a sufficient cache of food that you don't ever need to do a bread-and-milk run in the face of bad weather. Develop a list of the items you use most often, shelf-stable staples like pasta and rice, and watch for local sales. Buy three times what you need whenever it's on sale. Not only will you avoid the dreaded crowded panic shoppers, you will find that you spend less on food than you used to.

Oppression

2011-01-15T09:15:00.000-05:00

This occurred to me this morning, though it really should've occurred to me sooner. In the midst of all this upset over who's to blame, over talk radio, over Mein Kampf, etc. I came across this:

On NPR’s All Things Considered Wednesday, commentator Daisy Hernandez (who’s no relation to POTUS-designated American hero Daniel Hernandez) discussed her immediate fears upon hearing of the shootings in Tucson: she was keenly interested in knowing the shooting suspect’s surname.

For Hernandez, hearing the name Loughner, not “Ramirez, Gonzalez or Garcia” prompted a wave of “Brown relief”–a feeling that the Latino community had been spared a certain media firestorm that would have forced the immigration debate onto the nation’s front burner:

Now this is being touted in the liberal side of the internet media as a sign that Arizona's immigration law is bad. We're being terrible to these people. We're oppressing them. They're afraid. They hear about the gunman and instantly say, "I hope the shooter isn't Hispanic."

This is an understandable fear for any group that deals with any level of persecution. When a white man is murdered in the inner city, there's a population that says, "I hope the shooter wasn't black." When a bomb blows up near a mall, I'm sure there's a population that says, "I hope the perpetrator wasn't Muslim." They worry about the backlash if the perpetrator is found to be one of them.

When I first heard of this shooting, my first thought was not "I hope the perpetrator wasn't TEA Party." My first thought wasn't, "I hope the perpetrator wasn't conservative." My first thought was:

I hope the victim isn't a Democrat.

I knew that if the victim was a Democrat, it wouldn't matter if the perpetrator was from Mars. Groups of people fear criminals among them if they are being oppressed by people who will punish the whole for the actions of one. But what does that say about a group that fears the victim being one of the oppressors, because it will result in them being blamed no matter who the perpetrator was?

It isn't that often that a bully creates enough fear that his victims already knew that they were going to suffer if anything happened to him, regardless of the actual identity of the perpetrator. Shouldn't that be discussed, if we're going to talk about civility and hatred?

Expansion desired

2011-01-13T09:47:00.000-05:00

When Bernie and I first married, we decided that we would like to have three children altogether. Well, I did the deciding, really. I said I wanted three. He said he definitely at least wanted two. I didn't worry over it. I didn't feel the need to compromise, or debate. I was diagnosed at age 20 with Stage II endometriosis and I didn't even know if I could have children.

My husband's mindset changed with the birth of our daughter. Oh, he was very happy and helpful with the birth of our son, but it was a stressful time for us, financially, and that gave him worries about how he was going to care for his family. Now he's settling into a more secure position, and we're doing alright. Before our daughter, he said he definitely wanted one or two children. Now he joins me in saying that he definitely wants three... maybe even four!

When we purchased this house, it must have seemed silly for a young couple to pick up a four-bedroom bi-level. This house is both big and small at the same time. It's a very good house for people. It can hold probably five, maybe even six at the peak of its comfort level. We bought it knowing that we wanted several children, and we still do.

Of course, then reality intrudes. I had to work full-time while my husband dealt with an education issue and got himself a steady job that allowed me to return home. I was under tremendous stress and could not carry a pregnancy. Thanks to that, the age gap between my son and daughter is greater than I'd hoped. They are six years apart. I'm starting to creep close to age 35, when fertility drops and pregnancy starts becoming dangerous.

We still want a third baby.

Those of you who read this and pray, do pray that it may be in God's will to bless us a third time. We are doing what we can, and it's way too early to think that we might be having any difficulty, as we're only on our second cycle of attempting. But do please feel free to pray. Sooner is better, in my opinion, but I will take what God gives me, when He gives it to me, and have faith.

I do believe that God did not give us a four-bedroom house just so that we could have two children and then stop.

Yay for snow days!

2011-01-12T09:06:00.000-05:00

Yes, I did want to update this blog daily this year if I could, with the exception of Sundays. Yes, I didn't update on Wednesday. Yes, I'm going to backdate this entry to fill it the gap.

So what happened?

In Connecticut, we broke our record for the greatest amount of snow in a 24-hour period when 18-24 inches (depending on location) fell around the state, with some places totaling 30 inches altogether. At my home, we got an even 20.

My son went out playing in the snow with my mother. I didn't take my daughter out at all, but she's going out in it today now that the driveway is plowed out. See, yesterday, the snow was as high as she was and there was simply no place for her to walk!

How did we weather the storm? Well, I always keep a good supply of food on hand, because my area is sufficiently rural that going out to the store all the time is a real pain. Our power went out, but my electric company deserves great praise for fixing it pretty promptly. They had trucks out within an hour and fixed the problem an hour and a half after it went out. This is good for us, because we have no source of heat that is not electric-dependent. We have an oil furnace that is lit, not by pilot light, but by electric spark.

Our gorgeous little bi-level doesn't really have room for a woodstove, or you'd better believe I would have one in this house. I know how to deal with woodstoves. I grew up with one. Unfortunately, we are going to have to find some other method by which to (someday) heat our home when the power goes out. I believe our best bet now is to find a generator, as that would give us water as well.

Politics and shootings

2011-01-11T18:48:00.000-05:00

The media craziness about Rep. Gifford's shooting has reached a new level. At this point, if I was asked to identify the mentally disturbed person in the story, I don't know if I'd pick the shooter or several of the major news media outlets. That is frightening.

Of course everyone has got something to say about this, and I'm no exception, so I'm just going to toss out a few thoughts on the tragedy.

1. To the news media: If the TEA Party birthed a violent revolutionary who decided to shoot and kill just one political opponent, even just one of our political opponents who was also a Congressman, it sure as heck wouldn't be some Arizona representative whose name I never even heard until this tragedy. We wouldn't be going after a Blue Dog moderate who voted against Obama on almost every issue, voted against Pelosi as minority leader, and supported the Arizona laws on immigration.

2. The leftists are pursuing a false dichotomy. They announce that the shooter was a conservative crazy and then claim that the only way for us to refute it is to prove that he was a liberal crazy. I even heard one fellow make the remarkable claim that the shooter once called someone a terrorist for having an abortion, therefore he was unquestionably a TEA Party Conservative Palin Supporter. Look, guys, this is like saying that a man has brown hair unless you can prove that it's blonde. There are more than two colors to choose from here.

3. "This just proves that political rhetoric should be kinder and gentler, like it used to be." Since when? This claim is being made by people who apparently never had a comprehensive history class, and used to justify yet another push for the return of the un-"Fairness Doctrine", which says that the liberal viewpoint must make up 80% of the news media, 95% of the state-run education system, and 50% of talk radio. So to what kinder, gentler era do they want to revert our political rhetoric? Back when politicians used to settle their arguments with duels and fistfights? Are they aware that the distances between people during Congressional talk was set so that they were out of sword's reach of each other? Is that where they want to return us?

4. It was a surveying symbol on Palin's map, not a crosshairs. If you want to blame the rhetoric of targeting symbols used to drive crazy people to murder, look to the Democrats and their bullseye map. It's worth noting also that only days before this tragedy, multiple liberal constituents weighed in on Daily Kos to exclaim that their congresswoman was "DEAD to me" for having not voted for Pelosi as minority leader.

5. What is it about Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto that nearly every non-Muslim terrorist nut in the past however many years has been a fan? Are these books our modern-day equivalent of Sauron's One Ring, in some way inherently corrupting to all who read it? Or are they just the most accessible materials of the sort that crazy people might use to justify their actions? If we're going to look into shutting up Rush Limbaugh for the sake of someone who went off the rails after favoring socialist and fascist fundamentals, isn't it time to ask libraries to consider banning these books for our own safety? (I ask this tongue-in-cheek. I do not support a ban.)

6. Above all, please remember what this poor woman was nearly killed for: She refused to answer, at a town meeting, the question, "How do you know words mean anything?"

That was it. That is what started it.

What political persuasion asks questions like that? Where is that on Palin's website? Where is it on Pelosi's website?

This was a madman, pure and simple.

Death Panels explained: Part 1

2011-01-10T13:38:00.001-05:00

I've been hearing people claim that, without Obamacare, there will be medical scarcity. The truth is that Obamacare artificially creates medical scarcity. Granted, the current way Medicaid and Medicare are run already artificially creates a certain level of medical scarcity. Obamacare just makes it worse.

The new phrase to learn is "Pay for Performance". This is something that has been implemented privately already within some hospitals and publicly with some state-run programs. This is how it works: When the P4P group reimburses the doctor, they look at his rating. The rating is used as a modifier to decide how much he is reimbursed. This rating may be created in many different ways, but Obamacare has a specific means in mind.

Obamacare, I must add, reserves this wonderful new measure for Medicare and Medicaid.

Medicare and Medicaid are already notorious for under-compensating the doctors. If a Medicare patient goes to the doctor with a bad cough and is charged, say, $150 for the visit, Medicare will pay the doctor, on average, about $50-70. If our private insurance companies did that, then the doctor would charge us the other $80-100. However, in Medicare and Medicaid, the doctor is not permitted to make any effort towards regaining his lost income. Now, most doctors do not work with a profit margin of 60% of their intake. Therefore, all Medicaid and Medicare patients provide a loss.

This is, by the way, why doctor's offices will only take a certain number of Medicare or Medicaid patients. This is why it's hard for them to find doctors. Each doctor can only afford to take so much of a loss before he risks bankruptcy. Only a small percentage of his patients can come from Medicare or Medicaid.

Now P4P will create a rating for each doctor that is based nearly entirely on his cost effectiveness. What does this mean? Suppose a 95-year-old woman needs a knee replacement to remain mobile. She has two choices: Have the operation and stay on her feet, or consign herself to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Usually, she would make that decision depending on affordability versus usefulness, and she would make it based on her own beliefs and ideals. If she is a sedentary woman, she may find the wheelchair to be an easier path, but if she is an active runner, she might think that it is worth any cost to give her that ability back again.

In Obamacare, however, if she has that operation and then dies of pneumonia 18 months later, her operation is deemed to have not been cost-effective and her doctor's score goes down.

That score is used along with a multiplier to decide how much the doctor gets paid by Medicare or Medicaid patients. If he refuses to do the operation for her, he keeps a Grade A rating and may receive something like $100, or maybe even $120, for the $150 office visits. If he does it, however, his rating drops and his reimbursement does as well, for every Medicare or Medicaid patient he takes.

Why on earth would anybody set up something like that? The problem is that liberals do not understand why the doctor makes the medical decisions that he makes. See, there really is a mild problem with doctors over-prescribing and over-treating certain situations. For instance, a patient with bronchitis is likely to be able to clear it up with his own immune system inside of a week or two. However, the doctor is likely now to prescribe antibiotics whether he needs them or not. Why?

The current system of malpractice suits allows anyone who can convince a judge that he has been wronged by his doctor to sue, not only for damages, but for 'pain and suffering' as well. Suppose that doctor does not give out the antibiotics, and tells the patient to return within a week or if certain systems develop. Suppose that patient doesn't see the doctor in a week and gets worse and worse, until he has to come in and receive an emergency course of antibiotics for, say, $800 all told. Now he can sue that doctor for $800 in costs and $10K, or maybe $100K, or any arbitrary number, for pain and suffering.

The Republican answer to this problem was a proposal to cap pain and suffering malpractice payments and to set up a special court system allowing people with medical knowledge to judge whether or not the doctor did the wrong thing. That's because the Republicans understood that the reason why doctors over-treat is because of fear of lawsuit.

Obama told us a bunch of stories about pediatricians removing tonsils from children and physicians amputating the feet of diabetics in order to make more money. That's right, Obama and those who created Obamacare firmly believe that the only reason why doctors over-treat (and perform regular acts of malpractice) is to line their own pockets. Naturally, they believe that the best way to rein in these evil doctors is to pay them less for over-treating their patients.

That leaves doctors in a catch 22. They will have a choice with Medicaid and Medicare patients between risking higher bills by being sued for perceived under-treatment or risking lower payments from the government for perceived over-treatment. Since so many doctors are still small business owners working under private practices, the best and safest answer is clear: Stop taking Medicare and Medicaid patients at all.

And now for something completely different...

2011-01-08T10:14:00.000-05:00

I woke up to about two or three inches of new snow on the ground this morning. I was happy to see it. We've got a couple more inches coming down tonight, and the next storm may hit us on Wednesday of next week. Out here on the East Coast, we don't get the kind of crazy snow they get in the Northern Mid-West of the country, but it's enough to please me.

I live in a bi-level. Bi-levels are commonly called "raised ranches", but they aren't actually a genuine raised ranch. A ranch is a simple house design that clusters the kitchen, living room, and dining room close together at one end of the house and extends the bedrooms down a hallway in the other half. A raised ranch is one in which the front door leads to a full staircase, with the kitchen/living/dining area and master bedroom upstairs. Ground floor is usually made up of a den, possibly another bedroom, and sometimes garage space. A bi-level is half-and-half, with the door opening into a very small landing with half a staircase leading up to the kitchen/living/dining/bedrooms and the other half leading down into a floor that is halfway below-grade, usually with full or nearly-full windows that hover only a few inches off the ground outside.

If architecture of houses interest you half as much as it interests me, here's a link to an explanation of the bi-level. It's really a pretty common house type in my area, if you own a house that was built less than 50 years ago.

The link explains that some bi-levels are luxury, but most are 1,000-1,500sqft cozy homes that make the most of their space. Mine would fall into the latter category. The bedrooms are quite small (compared to older Colonials or Victorians, and compared to modern non-ranch homes). It suits me, though deep in my heart I still favor the Colonials and Victorians for their vintage flair.

I'm in a fairly rural area. Well, it depends on your definition of rural. People who live where the nearest town is 50-100 miles away and the nearest neighbor is 3 miles away think I'm positively urban. People who live within 5 miles of the grocery store and 1 mile of the gas station on a half-acre lot think I'm practically a forest creature. My own home sits on four acres of very beautiful Southern New England woodlands with wetlands adjoining.

So when I see snow outside my bedroom window, I see it lining every intricate branch of the multitude of trees outside. And that's just the way I like it.

Christianity in General

2011-01-07T09:57:00.000-05:00

Reading other people's thoughts (not just the commenter on my post, but others as well) on Obama's Christianity leads me to decide that I should have a post that clearly defines what I do and don't view as being Christian.

I'm pretty inclusive and exclusive at the same time. I do believe that every denomination except for the very fringe has Christians in it. Sometimes you have Protestants who believe that Catholics are not Christian, or Catholics who believe the same of Protestants. I do not make that distinction. You can be a recognized member of the Catholic church, or any other denomination, or none, and that may or may not mean that you are an actual Christian.

What I define as Christian is what some call 'born-again', though I don't like that terminology because I don't believe that you have to be able to look back at a specific time when you Made Your Decision For Christ. I don't believe that you have to read off a Sinner's Prayer script. I don't believe that you have to have spoken in tongues.

However, a Christian has come to a knowledge of his own sin and his need for Christ's sacrifice on the cross in order to pay for that sin. Furthermore, as a follower of Christ, this Christian can be seen to change for the better over time, becoming more like what God would have him to be. Christianity starts where most religions end. Most religions end with the success or failure to obtain eternity/paradise. Christianity deals with what happens once you've acquired it.

Christianity necessitates growth. Whether you attend a "high" church or a "low" church, whether you have an altar or a podium, statues everywhere or no decoration, whether your Communion has real wine or grape juice, a real Christian will be changing every day. He will be becoming less selfish, more compassionate, wiser with his words, and stronger in God's truth. The process may be slow at times and fast at others. God may be leaving some faults until later, or even strengthening weaknesses that are not visible to others' observations. Still, over all, over time, you will see a certain humility and honesty in the behavior of the committed Christian.

Simply attending a church doesn't make you a Christian. Even being able to spout out the theology of a particular denomination doesn't make you a Christian. I know atheists and self-described witches who have more theological knowledge than the average Christian. What makes you a Christian is living it, having accepted Jesus's gift on the cross and been declared righteous in God's eyes. What makes you a Christian is having your name written in the Book of Life.

The New House and Obamacare

2011-01-06T10:26:00.000-05:00

The new House started yesterday, with a reluctant Pelosi handing the gavel to Boehner, who immediately demonstrated that he knew just what to do with it. (No, he didn't hit Pelosi in the head.)

New House rules include a reading of the U.S. Constitution on the House floor today. That's a one-time thing, but there are other rules that are very nice, including a mandatory 72-hour online posting of bills before they are voted upon. People, they're giving us the responsibility. Find the website where they are doing this (I'll give you a link when I find it myself) and read those bills! Write to your Congressmen! The 2010 midterm election should be a beginning for the TEA Party, not an end. Now is not the time to sit back and start ignoring politics, not now that we have people in there who will listen to us! Now is the time to speak!

They also have modified "pay-go" into "cut-go", meaning that new spending must be paid for by cuts elsewhere, but tax cuts do not need to be 'paid for'. Considering that Bush's tax cut resulted in more tax money received by the Federal Government, I believe that we are on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve and 'paying for' tax cuts through spending cuts is unnecessary.

Here's the rule I like best: All new bills must be accompanied by a statement in the Congressional Record pointing out the specific Constitutionally-granted Federal power being exercised in order to justify the law.

Boehner has quickly shown that he's got the balls that so many Republicans have lacked over the past four or more years. The new regulations, set up to make laws more difficult to pass, have been waived for the first order of business which has also been declared exempt of all amendments. This first order of business is a call to repeal Obamacare, plain and simple. Will they do it? Yes. Will they succeed? Not likely, but our new Republicans already have a multi-pronged plan by which to rend Obamacare into unusable pieces.

Speaking of which, I want to show this around. Five top Democrat senators sent Boehner a letter warning him that the Senate will definitely block any repeal of Obamacare, so he may as well not try, because it will be a waste of time. Boehner's office sent back a prompt reply:

Senators Reid, Durbin, Schumer, Murray and Stabenow:

Thank you for reminding us – and the American people – of the backroom deal that you struck behind closed doors with ‘Big Pharma,’ resulting in bigger profits for the drug companies, and higher prescription drug costs for 33 million seniors enrolled in Medicare Part D, at a cost to the taxpayers of $42.6 billion.

The House is going to pass legislation to repeal that now. You’re welcome.

- Speaker-Designate John Boehner’s Press Office

Thank you, Boehner, new Speaker of the House, for showing the rest of them how it's done.

By the way, YouCut has been moved from the Minority Whip website to the Majority Leader website. The choices have not changed since the previous YouCut week, but the blog strongly suggests that the next set will arrive shortly.

Obama's Christianity

2011-01-05T10:01:00.000-05:00

When I re-started posting regularly in this blog about a week or so ago, I hinted at an answer I was writing in a forum, where I feared condemnation for my bold way of saying things. I'd like to address that answer and that issue today. It is the issue of Obama's religion.

I enjoy reading the articles written by a Canadian conservative columnist, David Warren, and part of today's article, perhaps, says it all:

U.S. President Barack Obama is reported to be attending church again, and shows a "fresh start," by persistently misquoting from the Book of Genesis, chapter four. "I am my brother's keeper; I am my sister's keeper," he suggests it says. Check out the original. It is a scene in which no sisters appear, and the brothers in question are Cain and Abel. In particular, the intellectual leap from "you must not murder your brother," to "you must create and sustain a vast and ponderous welfare system, that is funded by taxing him and borrowing the rest from China," is not Biblical.

Obama claims to be a Christian. He attends church (sometimes). He reportedly reads his Bible every day. Isn't that enough to prove your Christianity? It may be enough to prove that you are an adherent of most religions, to attend service and read the holy book. Christianity, however, is so much more than what you do. Christianity is what you are. You don't become a Christian just by reading a book and attending a service. You become a Christian by repenting of your sin and following God, taking His worldview as your own, and disregarding all others. A maturing Christian changes over time. Humility replaces pride. Self-sacrifice replaces selfishness. Honesty and sincerity rule your speech and mannerisms. You strive for a higher goal, and the ends can no longer justify the means.

Now I do not have the authority to judge who is going to Heaven and who is not. I cannot tell you if Obama's name is written in the Book of Life. Ultimately, that is not my decision. Many Christians are aware of this, and many will not even say what I am going to say, because they are afraid of being labeled as 'judgmental' which, like 'tolerance', is a neutral quality that has been redefined to carry a decided connotation.

However, many parts of the New Testament make it clear that we Christians of the New Covenant have a bound duty to judge on Earth. Being mindful that we were once all of the terrible sinners who are now coming to repentance, we are only to judge those who are "inside" (claim to be Christian) and only upon a decided lack of fruit from their supposed adherence to the Church. Specifically, if one is engaging repeatedly and unrepentantly in sin, we are told to speak to him alone, then take a friend, then bring it to the deacons and elders, with excommunication as the final and most severe of punishments.

We were given this power in order to ensure that the insincere were excommunicated before they sullied the entire religion, before Christianity could mean nothing, before our detractors could claim that Christians were no more likely than anyone else to avoid cheating, stealing, divorce, sexual immorality, etc. In that, the Church in the United States has, in many denominations, failed.

Supposedly, Obama has attended a Christian church for many years. However, I say now and boldly that a preacher who says "God d**n America", who puts racial politics before the blood of Christ, is no Christian preacher and his sermon is not that of a Christian church. As for Obama himself, he has consistently made decisions and given speeches that strongly push the tenets of Secular Humanism while giving lip service to Christianity. If this is some front for his real, true, Christian self, then he will have to face God for what he's done... and his fate will be lighter than if he is indeed pretending to be a Christian while living in pride, selfishness, and greed. In the end we will know his fate, and I hope it will not be what it seems to be right now.

I have heard some people bitterly announce that conservatives believe that liberals themselves are unable to be Christians, and the reason why we doubt Obama's Christianity is merely because he is a Democrat president. Let me lay that to rest right now with a personal story. One woman from my church, a friend of my mother's, is very liberal. She honestly believes that Obama is the best thing to ever happen to this country. She thinks W Bush is a crook and a villain. But you know why? She honestly thinks that liberalism is the best way to feed the hungry and help the poor. She isn't out for some class retribution, and she couldn't care less about racial politics.

She and her husband are out there, in the city, bringing poverty-family children to Sunday School, helping their families get the food and services they need. She and her husband are out there in the January night, freezing cold, in the dangerous parts of town, with no paparazzi, no teleprompter, no reporters, no cameras, no recognition... giving donated coats to street prostitutes.

I don't care if she's a liberal. I don't care if she's a card-carrying Communist. I'm proud to count her as a Christian, and I'll see her in Heaven.

Obama, on the other hand... May I be wrong. I do not want to see him burn for eternity. I honestly and sincerely do not, regardless of what his misguided policies are doing to my family and my country. However, unless he shows some signs of change, personally, regardless of his politics, I cannot in good conscience claim him as a fellow Christian.

2011-01-04T06:38:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, I took my copy of Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame to my grandmother's house. She hasn't kept up with Disney movies since Pocahontas, and I wanted to assure her that they were still turning out quality stuff. I went alone, because the kids are too young to see it, and we sat and visited afterwards.

This post has nothing to do with the Hunchback whatsoever.

We got to talking about Obamacare and its implications for the aging. It wasn't until I was driving home, however, that a really odd thought hit me.

Our parents take care of us when we are infants, when we're young children, patiently changing our diapers and mashing our food and talking to us when we can't talk in return. I've always thought that one good deed deserves another, and so this culture teaches us that we pay our gratitude forward in caring for our own children. Increasingly, we are teaching and therefore learning that the way of things is that the children are our future and of utmost importance, while the job of the elderly is to pass on and allow the younger ones to take the field.

I am now thinking that this is wrong.

Instead, this is what happens. When you are a child, your parents care for you. As you mature, however, they slowly begin to revert. As a person gets older, he finds his memory beginning to slip. His words become muddled. He may no longer be able to reliably clean up after himself. He may lose his teeth. He is 'regressing' in behavior and abilities to a more childlike state. That is when you pay, not forward, but back.

That is when the right thing to do is to care for your childlike elderly parent as that parent has cared for you. That is when you return all the gentility and dignity with which they have endowed you.

Of course you should care for your own children, but not out of a debt to your parents. You care for them because you love them and give of yourself, literally, for their creation and subsistence. You do not repay a debt to your parents by raising your children and abandoning the elderly to their fate. You repay a debt to your parents by caring for your parents.

My grandmother is still in full possession of her faculties. She and my grandfather still live independently. I hope I will always find time to spend with them while they can still intelligently answer my questions and share their thoughts and discoveries. As they age and become more childlike, I hope I will be able to give them the same care, kindness, and basic human decency as they gave me when I was 'knee-high to a grasshopper'.

Homeschooling Schedules

2011-01-03T08:27:00.000-05:00

Today my son starts back up from Christmas holiday. I homeschool him, and I built a two-week vacation into the middle of the year. I warned him yesterday. "I want you up, dressed, your bed made, and your breakfast eaten. I want you to present yourself with your pencil by 9am."

But isn't the point of homeschooling to have no schedule? To be able to do your spelling in your pajamas, to be able to work from 6am to 10am or from 2pm to 8pm if you prefer?

Well, that depends. If you have a child who is creative and independent and prefers to work on an odd schedule, then yes, by all means you can switch it up. Also, on some days, it is nice to know that you can relax as you work and you don't need to go through the hustle and bustle of other households in the morning. Many homeschooling households don't do this, however, mainly because they are trying to raise children who will be able to be up and ready to work by a certain hour.

(Some people talk as if the only reason why you would homeschool is for the benefits that you only find in homeschooling. The first and foremost thing they can think of is the schedule. Those who homeschool come to believe that they are giving their children a better education than they could find in public school, even if they ring bells to change classes. That one-on-one attention (or one-to-three, or one-to-five, depending on the number of students) just can't be equaled.)

Now what about the kids who don't keep a homeschooling schedule? Are they setting themselves up for failure, when they first try to work in the 'real world'? Not at all. The Work Schedule is a fairly artificial construct. Although many jobs require it, many more don't. The homeschool parent will want to make sure his child is capable of sticking to a schedule if necessary, but if his talents and interests are carrying him towards an on-call job, why force him to accustom his body to a hard schedule?

Why Liberalism fails

2011-01-02T09:18:00.001-05:00

Despite decades of 'affirmative action', a disproportionate number of favored minorities go on to fail school and end up in jail. The percentage of people below the poverty line has wobbled within the same margin since the 1950's, despite increasingly massive government programs meant to end poverty. Despite legalized abortion-on-demand supposedly preventing child abuse due to unwanted pregnancy, deaths due to child abuse have been on an upward trend for decades. Everywhere liberalism has been tried, it has not only failed, but done so hugely. Many people who are drawn to liberalism are drawn, not to the failure, but to the promise. Liberalism promises utopia on earth, something which Christian Conservatism cannot. Why does Liberalism fail?

What is liberalism? There are many quick and pithy definitions, but none of them can quite encompass it, because liberalism, like so many worldviews, is complex and a simple definition will not adequately describe a complex system. This is my definition: Liberalism is a worldview that begins with atheism and secular humanism. Now I'm sure everyone's heard the old "liberals are atheists" rag and immediately dismissed it because, hey, lots of liberals are not atheists at all. However, many are agnostics, or they follow a 'buffet style' version of a religion that does not require them to go against any of their liberal beliefs. Liberalism quite simply works in a way that is always as close as it can get to being diametrically opposed to the principles in the Bible. Like the Ancient Romans, it permits any other religion so long as it is subordinated.

Liberalism becomes a slightly different creature depending on the venue in which you find it. In economics, it becomes socialism. In matters of personal freedom and responsibility, it becomes fascism. In the family, it becomes feminism. (I refer to the LAF description of feminism as it was overtaken by card-carrying members of the Communist Party in the 30's, not the very earliest stirrings of women seeking God-given rights and responsibilities in the Victorian Era.) Each time, whenever it has put its pet projects into effect, they have failed, usually miserably. Why?

The answer is because Liberalism fights against the ideas and beliefs best embodied in the Bible.

Now why the Bible? Am I some kind of nut? Why would Christianity be so big and strong and good that going against its precepts and lessons results in failure? Well, let me explain and qualify some of my statements. Many religions and belief systems are derived at least in part from the Bible, or the same principles are derived independently. If you follow the financial pointers in the Koran, for example, you will do well. However, those pointers were found first in the Bible. When other cultures do well, you will find that they are following Biblical principles, whether they know it or not.

Why the Bible and why Christianity? Because it is true.

The Bible is much more than just the long version of the Sinner's Prayer. It is a manual for the human condition written ultimately by the God who created us. As the inventor is ultimately the last word on how his invention was designed to operate, God knows best how we were designed to live. When we go outside that design, we run into trouble naturally and normally, not because God hates us or doesn't want us to have fun, but because He designed us to have fun in different ways and to find our pleasure in other things.

If you have always looked to the Bible for spiritual matters only, I would like to invite you to look at it again this year as a human manual in which you can discover details about how you were designed to live. I would like to especially recommend a thoughtful read of Deuteronomy, Proverbs, Romans, and both epistles of Timothy. You may come away from it with a new appreciation of the human condition... and a better understanding of why the principles of liberalism, when applied to it, will always fail.

Starting 2011: An Introduction

2011-01-01T09:54:00.000-05:00

Obviously I'm not one to give out a lot of personal data over an unsecured blog, but I thought those of you who follow this might be interested in knowing a little about who I am. My little side paragraph basically says it all, but I'll expand on it just a little bit with the parts I don't mind sharing.

I'm in my early 30's, a homemaker with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science. I worked about eight years or so in the field before retiring to, in my opinion, a better one. My husband has a matching degree (same colleges and everything!) and he's in the field providing for all of us. He's an easy-going, friendly guy who works hard and faithfully.

We have two children, an eight-year-old boy and a nearly-two-year-old girl. I'm homeschooling the boy, who is now in second grade and doing very, very well. He's a good kid. The girl is cute as a button, bright and friendly and very funny.

I live in a rural part of Connecticut, in a bi-level house that is modern-style interior with a fake vinyl Grecian-Roman facade in the middle of the woods. Part of my life is the constant struggle between my OCD packrat behavior and my deep desire to see the house divested of anything that does not have sufficient beauty and purpose.

My life is a curious mix of modern tech and old-style homespun. I like to sew, though I'm really bad at it, and I make most of my food from scratch. On the other hand, I'm a computer gamer and have a machine I built myself with a quad-core processor and 1GB of video RAM. My favorite kitchen device is my stand mixer, and I try to plant a vegetable garden each year, though nothing yet has given me a decent yield except for the tomatoes.

What kind of things might you read on this blog? One day I'll be talking housekeeping, while another day I'll have politics on my mind. Politics, religion, homemaking, all the spheres of my life are intricately interconnected.

If you've read any of my old posts, no doubt you already know that I am a Christian and a conservative. The former informs the latter. What does that mean? Well, for one, when I criticize big government, I am more likely to add in the role of the individual and the church in a properly-functioning society. Some conservatives and libertarians speak as if government and society is the same thing. I believe that it is not.

Anyways, that's enough talk for today. I'm going to try to post more often. We'll see how it goes.

New Year’s Resolution: 1920x1080

2010-12-31T12:38:00.000-05:00

Each year I re-resolve several things, but this year I’m going to repeat my little ritual and re-resolve them once again.

Why do I do this to myself?

Well, though I fail to hit my target each year, I do come closer to reaching it. My house is cleaner today than it was last year on this date. My weight is closer to normal. I have made the greatest leaps and strides in my writing. So here I go again, with the same New Year’s Resolutions as ever before, and one of them, of course, concerns this blog and me posting in it more often.

Resolution 1: Writing more
I made leaps and strides here, when I decided to join in the NaNoWriMo challenge (lovingly nicknamed “Cain’t Write No Mo’” about halfway through) and finish the first draft of a book I had outlined some time ago. I discovered that I was capable of putting 2,000 words on a story each day, no matter how I was feeling or how inspired I was. My challenge was to see if I was a writer, not only in good times, but also in bad. I succeeded.
I put aside the draft for the entire month of December, but in January I want to turn out my first-edited form for family and friends to read, with an eventual goal of publication. For 2011, I also want to turn this blog into something people will actually come back to read and, you know, find new stuff *to* read. I’d like to post in it at least weekly, at most daily.

Resolution 2: Clean my house
My house-decorating philosophy is actually quite simple. I am a fan of all that is useful and beautiful. If it is beautiful but not useful, or if it is useful and not beautiful, I am more likely to want it gone. Sounds simple enough, right? Unfortunately, I am also OCD and a bit of a packrat. I have so many things I want gone that I have never been able to rid myself of.
I have a genuinely nice house that would have all the room I needed if we would only get rid of the things we don’t use/like/need.

Resolution 3: Stick to my proper weight
I’m really not that bad off. I picked up an extra 10-15lbs during my second pregnancy, and they just haven’t come off yet. Actually, I began this year 15lbs up and ended it 10lbs up, so I am honestly getting myself back into shape. This goal I’m not too worried about, not just because I think I can do it, but also because it isn’t really all that important to me.

Will this be “my year”?
To be honest, I will be happy even if I make a small gain in each goal. Best case scenario will find me, on December 31st, 2011, reporting that my house is clutter-free and my first novel has been published, and that my BMI has gone from 25 to 22.5.

Being Bold

2010-12-27T23:13:00.000-05:00

I watched The Dark Knight on our new Blu-Ray player tonight. The player was a Christmas gift to the entire household, and it is gorgeous. I loved the visuals and the sound. I do believe that it is an excellent movie, though not for children... it is rated PG-13, but it really should have been rated PG-15.

During one part of the movie, Joker has threatened to kill people each night until Batman gives up his identity and turns himself in. At a press conference, Harvey Dent tries to convince the people of Gotham that they don't really want to insist on this. He tells them that Batman will have to answer to his vigilante behavior, but he must answer to the people of Gotham, not to a madman. He must answer in their own timeline, not under threat by a terrorist.

After the movie, I settled down to check my emails and forum posts, and found myself typing a comprehensive response to the question of whether a certain political figure was a Christian. As I explained how Christianity was more than just attending church, how a Christian over time sees humility replace pride and self-sacrifice replace selfishness, I was already catching myself cringing over my own words. "I am not fit to sit on the judgment throne, but we were given this power on Earth, judgment and excommunication, in order to prevent the insincere from making God's power seem meaningless." (Those were not my exact words, but it was the gist of what I was saying.) Even as I typed, though, I caught myself cringing. My debate opponent was definitely going to accuse me of pride, I thought, and thereby argue that I am not a real Christian if this political figure is not.

Then I remembered the movie, and from that I have this message to give to Christians at the close of the year.

Those who are working against Christianity have been steadily redefining words and changing labels. This is not only a Christian-Humanist thing, but a liberal-conservative one as well. You redefine compassion and accuse your opponent of having none, so that he supports socialist programs in order to appear to the people to have compassion. You redefine pride, so that you can keep your opponent from speaking out boldly for fear that people think he is prideful and thus a hypocrite. If you can accuse him of hypocrisy, you have won the debate, even if the facts are on his side.

Now, I am not the kind of 'bold' Christian who says anything on my mind without softening, without thought. Some people are eager, for instance, to walk up to anyone on the street who appears to adopt a homosexual identity and declare that this person is going straight to Hell. I do not. However, others try very hard to act accepting, to hold their tongue when they should speak honestly and carefully, because they do not want to be seen as intolerant. They fear that society can no longer tell the difference between integrity and pride, between humility and hypocrisy. They fear being seen as prideful and hypocritical if they act in simple, honest, genuine boldness.

Speak and be bold. Let God alone tie your hand or still your speech. Be plain and honest in your dealings. Speak the truth, not with anger or harshness, but with love. When you do keep silent, when you do cushion your words, when you do choose your battles and decide that a certain time is not the time to fight, do it for love and concern for the other person. Do not do it out of fear for your own reputation.

Show true humility. It is pride that makes you want to appear to fit the new definition of humble. Avoid hypocrisy. Do not fear being labeled as a hypocrite. This generation is inundated by definitions and ideas which are as shallow and weak as artificial flavoring in an artificial meal. You can satisfy yourself with it unless you are exposed to the real thing. People will know, deep inside, when they see the real thing. The charges of hypocrisy, or pride, or ruthlessness, will not stick if you hold to the truth of humility, strength, and honesty. You do not need to meet their definitions out of fear.

Even someone who has heard only their side for an entire lifetime will know what's real when they see it. Christians must be bold in God, humble in God, honest in God, and compassionate in God... and properly represent the truth.

Plenty

2010-07-26T20:44:00.000-04:00

I did laundry today. I hung sheet sets and jeans/pants on the line and did underwear and the smaller stuff in the dryer. Not as economical as hanging everything out, I know. Still, this middle-of-the-road solution works for me. As I finished putting the clothes away, I got a sense of well-being. I do enjoy having the laundry done, for the same reason why I love foodshopping. I get a deep satisfaction from seeing my house set up with plenty. Not wastefully huge, not scarce... just plenty. I know my husband would give me an odd look if I demanded that he come and see my 15-month-old daughter's dresses all hanging neatly in the closet, so I will show it to my readers instead.

Since my family is a classic single-income homeschooling family, we don't exactly have a lot of clothing money. I shake my head incredulously when I hear of women going to the store and spending $200 on clothing as if it's nothing. So how did I manage to glean such a lovely wardrobe? Well, "glean" is a good way of putting it.

Back in the Old Testament days, according to the laws of Ancient Israel, you were told to only harvest your field once. Instead of picking over it again and again to garner every grain and every fruit, you needed to leave it alone for the poor, the widows, and the orphans. This was an interesting kind of 'welfare program' unlike most common systems in that it required the recipients to work for their gain. Look in the book of Ruth to find a story of a widowed woman patiently gleaning leftover grain in order to feed herself and her mother-in-law.

My church has a giveaway room, and my aunt has kept the pretty dresses that family members sewed for her daughters. My stepmother-in-law also keeps an eye out for pretty things at yard sales. Through these sources, I have patiently assembled my daughter's wardrobe. The things you don't see hanging are the 2-3T dresses that I have folded and put in a box for next year.

Making plenty from little can be done, but it does take patience and foresight. I need to be willing to pick up items that I don't need right away. I need to have enough skill with a needle to repair discarded outfits with very little wrong with them besides a lost button or burst seam. I need to be vigilant and creative. My reward is that lovely closet full of little hanging dresses that my girl hugs in delight when I present them to be worn.

Does my post have a point? It has several, which is why this isn't really a proper Article Post of the sort that I usually write. For now, though, I just want to focus on that happy feeling I get when I see "the plenty" in the wardrobe, and how fulfilling my job as a homemaker in a frugal household can be.

Maybe you'll get a picture of my garden vegetables another time.

And when they came for me, there was nobody left

2010-06-21T21:51:00.001-04:00

I have several things to say about the BP oil spill, but many people are saying them already. I may devote another post to the government regulation that led to the spill and exacerbated its detrimental effect, but for now I want to focus on a slightly different topic.

The important thing about this society is that we enforce the law for everyone, not just the people we like.

This is important, and fairly unusual throughout human history. Before this Reformation-based civilization, it was fairly common for the authorities to turn a blind eye to abuses that happened to unpopular figures. If you were a pauper accusing your lord of rape, you couldn't expect to see him put up on trial. If you were a gypsy, you would be lucky just to keep your head down and avoid being killed on sight.

Even in this illustrious country, we have had problems with 'unpopular' people. The first gun control laws were enacted to prevent the newly-freed blacks from arming themselves. Why did they need to arm themselves? If a black man was brutally beaten for the crime of walking down a certain street, the feeling among the racist supremacists was that he deserved it because he was getting 'uppity'. However, we have always as a society followed the laws that permitted 'inconvenient things' like voting rights and innocent-until-proven-guilty, 'even if' that meant championing the human rights of the minority races.

In fact, even present-day America is not immune from the tendency to categorize some people as 'unpopular', showing less sympathy when they are victimized. There are some men who rape lesbian women and believe that the women deserved that cruel treatment. However, as before, we follow those laws and prosecute these men as the criminals that they are. The important thing about our society is that we truly have that equality, and we do not set laws aside just because we don't like the victim much

Until now.

It started with AIG. Husbands and fathers found their homes besieged and death threats made against their children for the crime of receiving the bonuses that they had earned by lawful contract. The government should have intervened on their behalf, upholding the law for them, even though they are unpopular as blacks, Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals have been throughout history. Instead, Obama decided to give these people a very unlawful choice... either give up the compensation for their hours of hard work, or face ruin at the hands of an angry mob.

We saw it happen again when Toyota's upper management was hauled in front of the liberal Democrats and badgered about a vehicle problem that they were already hard at work trying to find and fix. There was no need for that kind of humiliation. They were already doing the right thing. Still, as an auto manufacturer who makes such horrible things as SUV's and trucks, they had to be shown that the unpopular members of society are no longer protected by the law.

Now it's happening with BP. The guy who got into trouble for calling Obama's demands of money a 'shakedown' ought to be praised to the skies for calling a spade a spade. They are learning what Toyota and AIG have already learned, a lesson that should chill us to the bone, such that we should be demonstrating against the government instead of against that evil, evil company who seeks to fill our vehicles with gas and our homes with heat.

Whether you are doing the right thing or not, whether you follow the laws or not, what now matters in this country is whether or not you are an unpopular minority.

If you are, then you may find yourself bereft of the Constitutional protections once intended for all, even those whose right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is 'inconvenient' to those who wish to tear them down in vile hatred.

Sure, it's just oil companies, bank executives, and auto manufacturers now. However, Obama once spoke out in contempt of those small-town Americans, the 'bitter clingers' to 'guns and religion'. How long will it be before he comes for you? And if you cheer on the suspension of law for the sake of those whom you despise, what will protect you when he comes for you?

And you shall become one flesh

2010-06-13T07:37:00.000-04:00

I have seen a trend that disturbs me. It is a similar trend to that which was seen in the 1800's, in areas of Europe and the southern United States. It always seems to follow wealthy societies. It would be nice to pretend that our wealthy society has been able to increase our worldly goods without falling into some of the traps of previous times, but humankind has not 'evolved' as many claim.

There are a few ways that we have seen wealth harm families in modern-day society, but there is one in particular that I would like to focus on today, and that is the separation of spouses from each other and parents from their children.

In the Victorian era, the very wealthy husband and wife did not find it unusual to have separate sleeping chambers. They spent their time among different friends; the wife in the parlor with the women, and the husband in the drawing room with the men. He might travel for months or years in search of more wealth, while she might go to visit a friend and not return for months or years. They were so wealthy that they could afford for each of them to live basically entirely different lives.

Most people in the U.S. share a marital bed (many of whom are not married, but that's another post), so how can I say that we're falling into the same trap? Well, have you ever seen the standard Master Bath of today? A separate shower, separate tub, two sinks set with a swatch of countertop in-between, and the toilet closed off into its own little alcove. There are, not one, but two walk-in closets in the typical New Home design that I see on the architectural websites, and the closets are nowhere near each other.

My concern goes far beyond walk-in closets, though. The huger homes of the upper-middle class and the rich allow for people to pursue their separate hobbies far beyond calling distance of each other. Even the middle class and lower-middle class often boast one vehicle for each family member above the age of 16. The largest separation in the family that I see, however, comes from the common cell phone.

The working husband and working wife, with their separate dressing areas and their separate mobile offices and their separate lives, could go for a week or longer while barely speaking a word to each other. As their children spend the working hours at daycare and school, and their evenings and weekends on a myriad of lessons meant to make them as fine and fancy as the other 'rich' kids, a family comes to the point where they strive to have a hasty sit-down dinner just in order to have the chance to see each other.

Now I hardly seem to be describing the life of a "rich" family. The upper-middle class, middle class, and even some lower-middle class families can meet this definition. Of course, so can the 'poor'... that is, those who are sufficiently poor for the Federal and State governments to provide their cars and cell phones and various activities. That is because this has become a decadently wealthy country. When we speak of the 'poor', we truly do not understand what it is to be poor. You may no longer be able to ask your mother for a description. Ask your grandmother.

Imagine for a moment a well-to-do but not 'wealthy' American farm out somewhere in the Midwest. The father and mother sleep in a bed that would be considered tiny by modern standards, in a room that would barely fit a modern nursery. The children share rooms. They need to discuss who needs the horse and buggy and who is going to accompany them. There is no daycare. The parents spend each day in the company of their children.

In the evening, there is no house big enough for each person to pursue separate hobbies in places where they cannot be heard by the others. The entire family sits down in the same room to learn writing or darn socks with no means of amusement except each other. This was not even considered poverty. It was merely the means by which the 'common folk' lived.

By now I can almost hear the objections. "But back then, the medicine was bad, and the food was harder to come by! The literacy rating was lower, and the technology was practically nil! We have all of those benefits today!" To which I answer: What does it benefit you if you gain the world and lose your soul?

Am I advocating an end to technology? Certainly not. However, I would like for us to show some ability to gain wealth while not making the mistakes that come with it. I would like to see the benefits of a modern society without the drawbacks. After all, if our lives are longer and more miserable, our education is up but our children are increasingly disturbed, our health is better but we are emotionally harming ourselves on a daily basis, have things truly improved?

How much better would we be if we took the best from each era? If technology helped to bind families together, wealth was a means to living well and aiding others instead of drifting off into fuzzy selfishness, and our longer lives were spent doing that which is worthwhile?

The Feminist Union

2010-05-31T08:56:00.000-04:00

Lately, I have been hearing more from self-identified feminists than I have for about three or four years. This is thanks to the Ladies Against Feminism site starting a Facebook page. Though you have to go through a vetting process to post articles on their website, all you have to do to post on their Facebook page is to click the "Like" button. A surprisingly large number of feminists, often two or three at a time, click that "Like" button so that they can express how much they dislike the group. In speaking with many of them, I have come to a realization that feminism can be likened to another group that rose in this country during roughly the same timespan. Feminism is like a worker's union.

My experience with (and distaste for) unions goes further than the newspaper stories I read or the discussions in conservative media. The same goes for feminism, and my experiences with both are strikingly similar. I'd like to outline a few similarities here.

Feminism, like unions, started with a good intent. The first worker's unions were formed to address a power imbalance between the workers and their employers. The intent was to bring people together to form a stronger bargaining power, correcting the excesses of the 19th century. Feminism was formed to address a power imbalance between men and women, and operates much in the same fashion. Both groups held protests and made their case, pushing initially for the kinds of equality championed in the Bible.

Feminism, like unions, was quickly diverted from its original intent. It wasn't long before unions started demanding more. As representatives only of the workers, they push for worker's rights at the expense of employer's rights. This creates hostility between those who should be cooperating. It also leaves unions in the place that they once fought against. They are now the ones in power, and with few employers being capable by law to challenge them, they have become the oppressors. The same can be said of feminism, where once they fought to allow women to open bank accounts and now they struggle to give women equal pay for inequal work. (More on that later.)

Feminism, like unions, degrade the worker by lumping him in with a group that may not share his/her abilities or ethics. Without the union, a poor worker is quickly removed and an excellent worker is quickly rewarded. With the union, however, all workers are lumped together, and so they are all treated the same. This happened to me when feminism sought to 'equalize' the number of women in math and science, regardless of the average woman's prowess or desire to compete in those areas.

I was a computer programmer, and I was a genuinely good one. I could have become a 'crack programmer'. When I was hired on a co-op position, I was already correcting the code of my group's 'crack programmer'. I especially loved working with C and Assembler, preferring to get into the guts of the logic and work with as little as possible between me and the hardware.

Many people reading this do not know that much about how computers and the computer industry works, so let me tell you that this is an unusual gift and an unusual focus for a woman. Nevertheless, feminism continues to push women into the programming field. The problem is that, though women on average make decently good maintenance programmers, the one who can build new code from scratch is rare. Now, if the only women entering the field were those who were genuinely good at the job, the only female programmers entering the workforce would be treated much as the men. This was my experience at the beginning of college, before the feminists really 'discovered' the field. By the time I was hired, though, most companies were wary of a female programmer and automatically relegated her to the maintenance section.

Before anyone starts calling these people chauvinists on my behalf, let me assert that I have seen the work of the average female programmer and I agree with them. The typical woman who was prodded into the field by feminists anxious to prove that women could do whatever men could do is sadly inferior to her male counterpart in the area of code-writing. Unfortunately, I was lumped in with them and lost in the shuffle. My manager, recognizing my intelligence, tried to push me onto the management track. All I wanted to do was to write code, and if the market had not been saturated by less competent women in the name of feminism, I might have succeeded.

Feminism, like unions, hate when their members negotiate their own way. In my last full-time job outside of the home, I ran into trouble. I was a working mother, struggling to balance family and employment while my husband finished his degree. I tried to work out some alternate arrangements with my employer to better suit their needs and mine. Unfortunately, union rules prevented us from compromising. The same rules that prevented them from cutting me some slack also prevented me from giving them a little more in return.

It is true that feminists keep asserting that they wish to give their members a choice and allow them to be homemakers and stay-at-home mothers if they so choose. However, they keep insisting upon representing me in order to give me 'freedoms' that I do not want (mostly in the area of paid daycare so that I can work outside the home and extra benefits for singles so that I do not have to be married) while removing privileges that would make my job much easier (like the right to modify the terms of a service agreement in my husband's name). Feminists insist upon speaking for all women, even the ones that they are putting at a disadvantage.

Feminists, like union officials, don't want membership in their ranks to be a voluntary matter. Well, they aren't entirely against the membership being voluntary, as long as everybody voluntarily agrees to join. Union officials and feminist leaders both engage in attempts at intimidation and shaming in hopes of forcing the reluctant to join their ranks. If you are not a feminist, you are not a proper woman. If you are not a feminist, you are cooperating with people who want to enslave women as blacks were once enslaved by Southern plantation owners. If you do not subscribe to feminism, you don't count.

I mentioned the Ladies Against Feminism Facebook page above. To their credit, a few of the feminists have simply left peacefully when they understand that we do not wish to embrace their philosophy. The rest, however, quickly devolve into insults and anger. They keep a mask of politeness for as long as they think that they can convert us, and then turn very ugly when we politely refuse to be converted. I would like to think that this was not a hallmark of feminism, but as I encountered this in my college and my workplaces as well, there is only so much that separates "random incidences" from "systematic behavior".

Feminism, like unions, have become sufficiently blatantly political that the only logic in the people and policies they support is that they are in agreement with the leftist Democrats. We live in the odd world where those who claim to support the workers are giving political contributions and doing favors for those whose policies are keeping the workers from improving their lives. In the world of feminism, those who should be championing the efforts of women in politics are demonizing female conservative politicians and circling the wagons for male politicians who mistreat women. They are quick to protest against conservative men who treat women decently, but they have a poor track record of opposing socialist countries that oppress their women severely.

Feminism, like unions, has outlived its usefulness. The tide has turned. It is possible for a woman to hold down a job without feminists screaming outrage. It is possible for a worker to negotiate with an employer (and, indeed, the richer ones are the ones who do their own negotiating) without a union threatening a strike. The abuses have been over-corrected, and now we need a movement in the opposite direction. Our brothers, husbands, fathers, and sons do not need to be our enemies.

Before feminism, women were able to participate in society. Though the situation in the 19th century needed to be corrected, it did not need a scorched-earth solution. Now the best thing we can do is to let wounded relations heal, and the continued acerbic mannerisms of feminism are only hurting those whom they claim to protect.

Response to Feminism

2010-04-30T08:28:00.000-04:00

I was pointed to a link this morning on a definition of feminism. It sought to strip away the history of the feminist movement and present the concept fresh, with nothing clinging to it. I read through it, and I discovered the problem, the snag, the reason why I still cannot call myself a 'feminist' despite its attempt to stick to a single core concept that the author no doubt hoped I could support.

Here is the link: http://tomatonation.com/culture-and-criticism/yes-you-are/
I will be quoting from it and responding as a member of the group Ladies Against Feminism, who seek to live by, in the words of the main site, a "strong, intelligent, biblical view of womanhood."

It starts with a definition.

feminism n (1895) 1 : the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes 2 : organized activity on behalf of women's rights and interests — feminist n or adj — feministic adj

This is how far I got before I spotted the first problem. Can you spot it? No doubt, legal equality of the sexes is a good and proper thing. God Himself set this up in Ancient Israel, in which women had equal status with men in criminal and property law. A woman's testimony was as good as a man's. When this was perverted in exile, Jesus restored it to our attention by having His resurrection first viewed by two women instead of two men. They satisfied the legal requirement for two witnesses.

However, this definition doesn't even mention legality. It mentions politics, economics, and society. Politics is a touchy subject. At one time, the vote was held by male property owners. This wasn't for the purpose of disenfranchising women. After all, the grown sons still living in their father's household could not vote, and the wife cast the vote in her husband's absence. This was a means by which the vote was given only to taxpayers. Remember that this was before the income tax. That being said, I think I can tentatively agree with political equality of the sexes. If a male in a certain situation can vote, a female in an identical situation can vote.

Economic equality is a different matter entirely. It assumes separation where there should be cooperation. With the breadwinner/homemaker model, the man earns and his wife saves. Before the Industrial Age, the husband and wife worked together on a farm or at a business, and it did not matter if one "earned more than the other" because the money all went to the same place. Of course, now that the man might work for one employer while the women works for another, "equality in economics" ignores the simple and wonderful fact that women bear and nourish children with their own bodies. This interruption in a career will result in economic inequality of outcomes if it is approached with equal opportunity or, if you wish to have equal outcomes, requires unequal opportunity. The only way to provide equality on both ends is to neutralize the woman's ability and desire to bear children. I cannot agree with this.

Social equality has problems of its own. As mentioned above, women bear and nurse children. They have different standards of physical modesty, different allowances made in pregnancy and breastfeeding, and are properly treated differently in a respectful society simply by being female. Of course, I acknowledge that I share with the feminists a desire to prevent situations in which a woman is assumed to be less intelligent or less capable for being female. But I would not like to see her treated no differently than a man in society.

This brings me to another problem, which could merit a post of its own. One of the people responding to the link in hopes of helping us to understand feminism said the following:

Feminism is not about "being men" - it is about refuting the concept that men are "default humans".

What, pray tell, is a "default human" and should we be striving for it? This is another problem with feminism. They appear to be making women like men and men like women because they are striving to create in one person an entity that represents the best of masculine and feminine, usually by stripping out the defining traits of both. This is the "default human". This I reject. Man is delightfully male, better than the "default human", complementary with the female, with strengths inherent in his masculinity. Woman is delightfully female, better than the "default human", complementary with the male, with strengths inherent in her femininity. The wonder of biblical womanhood is that it acknowledges not the "default human" but the "complete human", a man and a woman pair-bonded for life, bringing the fullness and richness of both sides to the table. This ties into the other part of the article that gave me trouble.

See, once the article is done with the definition, it spends most of its time defining what feminism is not. It isn't the clothes you wear, or the job you do, etc. This makes some sense, because this definition of feminism is meant to strip out what makes people male or female, and clothing is part of what distinguishes male from female. The bodies are different. Even a woman's jeans are different from a man's jeans in form, jutting out in some areas and not others. But that's beside the point. Here it is:

The definition of feminism does not judge your lifestyle. You like girls, you like boys, doesn't matter.

It has nothing to do with your sexual preference or your sense of humor or your fashion sense...

Ah, but that is the point. That which makes you female echoes through every single cell in your body, and informs everything you do in one way or another. Since I am a "Lady Against Feminism", I guard my sense of humor and do not indulge in jokes that tear down men. I seek modesty and attractiveness in my fashion. True, I can pull this off in jeans or dresses, but even when I dress in jeans and a t-shirt I am still doing so in a feminine manner. This is still off the heart of it, though, so let me say it right out.

The definition of feminism does not judge your lifestyle. You like girls, you like boys, doesn't matter.

They are not talking about the friends you make. They are talking about sexual preference. This is perhaps the largest example by which we can understand feminism and the desire to make us non-gendered beings. It doesn't matter. You 'like' girls, you 'like' boys, it doesn't matter. However, biblical femininity cannot work that way. This is not out of some 'hatred' for homosexuals. This is not even a matter of disapproving of the homosexual lifestyle. This is simply how femininity and masculinity works. When you see each person as richly male or richly female, you cannot pretend that pair-bonding two richly-female or richly-male people can result in that "complete human" which we seek. (May I add something here? When feminists scoff at us for seeking a man to make us complete, they are doing exactly what they claim to abhor, considering the male to be the "default human". We understand that our men also seek us to make them complete, and therein lies equality.)

In short, I must reject this "Yes You Are" philosophy of feminism, even shorn of its history and more radical statements. I can advocate equal rights under the law in a constitutionally-limited government. I cannot advocate that the childbearers of society be treated exactly the same as the non-bearers in matters of economics and sociology in which they are meant to be complementary. Likewise, I cannot advocate the "default human" stripped of a sexual identity. My choice is that of the richly masculine and richly feminine, pair-bonding to become the "complete human". I simply believe that it is a better solution.

A better way than this

2010-04-19T11:42:00.000-04:00

A cartoonist posted this in his blog a few days ago:

You know what this is? It's a sculpture by Blake Fall-Conroy, the Minimum Wage Machine.
From the site:
The minimum wage machine allows anybody to work for minimum wage. Turning the crank will yield one penny every 5.04 seconds, for $7.15 an hour (NY state minimum wage (and Ohio state minimum wage, too--)). If the participant stops turning the crank, they stop receiving money.

I generally hate 'abstract sculptures', but this one seemed to reverberate in my very soul. I spent a few years of my life at that crank (granted, not working minimum wage), trying to wring out the pennies we needed to keep the household going. Now my husband is the one who turns the crank.

Granted, not all jobs are quite this bleak. Many people are able to make their living doing something they enjoy, or, at least, something that is not consistently monotonous. My husband works as a computer programmer, a "code monkey", as he puts it. Still, most workplace jobs involve a certain level of cranking. That goes doubly for the kind of jobs in which working women often find themselves.

This is one reason why the feminist anti-homemaker viewpoint baffles me. They wish to replace a system in which the man returns home from the crank to find beauty, warmth, and stimulating conversation. They wish to end a system in which the woman spends all of her creativity, intellect, and strength in fulfilling tasks that make life for her husband so much more than 'the crank'. They want to take her from her home and children.

Their idea of utopia is the man and the women both out at their own separate cranks, grinding away while the government takes half of what trickles out and raises their children for them. The feminist dream ends each workday when whichever parent finishes at the crank first having to stop and pick up his (or her) children from daycare, then to arrive at a cold, empty house in hopes of making things a little brighter for the sake of his (or her) mate.

(Of course, this changes the house life even on weekends and holidays. I see more and more women choosing to put their children in daycare on vacation days so that they can "get a break" and have time to do the chores. I hear them complain about vacations from school, grateful when their own children return to someone else's care. You have to live with a child to know how to 'deal with' that child. You have to spend most of your hours in a child's company to get into that child's groove, so to speak, to understand which sounds of frustration denote hunger and which sounds denote sleepiness. But I am getting off the subject.)

We laugh at books and magazines written in the '50's that encourage housewives to fetch drinks for their husbands. There is even an Internet meme full of advice such as making yourself pretty when he returns home from work and not bothering him with trivialities until he has had a chance to relax. We read it and scoff about what doormats those women were back then. The next time you hear that advice, though, and the next time you are ready to laugh, I want you to go back to that picture and I want you to look at that crank.

That cartoonist's blog post continues:

Picture that. Picture standing there for four hours, six hours, eight hours a day, turning that crank to squeeze out one penny at a time till you have enough to pay the rent, put gas in the car, keep the water, electric, wash the clothes, feed the kid, pay your taxes.... Your day revolves around being there to turn that crank. Your life revolves around turning that crank. Your precious limited time on this dear sweet earth is eaten away by that crank.

Ladies, your husband has spent his entire day at that crank. If you are a full-time homemaker, or even if you are a part-time worker, he has spent his day at that crank for you and for your children. He will spend tomorrow at that crank. He will work that crank until he is elderly, and he's doing it for his family. If he is like my husband, he may complain about his work, but he never complains about the fact that he will be winding away at that or another similar crank for most of his life. That 50's meme that so many women find ridiculous, the easy chair and the glass of his favorite beverage, the effort you take to look pretty and provide him with a hot supper... that is the least we can do in return.

The Name of Jesus

2010-01-29T07:00:00.002-05:00

Indiana Jones, facing a minefield-trap with marked stones: The name of God.... Jehovah.

Henry Jones: But in the Latin, 'Jehovah' starts with an 'I'...

Indiana Jones: J... (takes a step and almost dies)

In one of the forums which I frequent, there was recently a discussion about a Christian Mythology claim brought forth by one of the members. The claim is that Jesus spent His early adulthood traveling to India to learn Buddhism from the monks. This is cited for the similarities between Jesus's morality and that of Buddhism, which entreats you to do revolutionary acts like caring for the poor and treating people decently.

Of course, there are numerous problems with the claim, among them the fact that it is very difficult to shoehorn Joseph of Arimethea into his proper role within the myth as secret favorite uncle (or great-uncle?) to Jesus. The problem that taught me the most, however, is the scroll that supposedly proves that someone of Jesus's description learned at the temples at around the time of His lifespan. This person carries the Arab/Indian name "Issa".

I thought I had seen that name before, and I was correct. "Isa" is widely and incorrectly cited as the "Arab name for Jesus." It is, in fact, the Muslim name for Jesus. Arab Christians call Him "Yasu".

Now some people might ask why that makes any difference at all. What is the importance of what Arab Christians call Jesus? We don't even have His name perfectly translated from the Aramaic. Jesus comes from the Latin "Iesus", which comes from the Arabic "Yesua/Yeshua", which is a diminutive of the Hebrew "Joshua/Jehoshua".

Ah, but there's the problem. "Yasu" translates nicely to "Yesua", and the Arab Christians have a very close form of Jesus's earthly name. "Isa/Issa", however, correlates far more strongly to another Hebrew name: "Isaac/Isaiah". (Some scholars say that "Isa" may be closer to "Esau".)

To veer into the realm of pure conjecture, I would like to ask this: Why do Muslims refer to Jesus as if His name was Isaac or Isaiah? There is, of course, the obvious conclusion: Muslims would say that Mohammed was correcting problems in the New Testament, while Christians and Jews would say that Mohammed was working off a flawed memory of old Biblical lessons, citing that earlier Muslim scholars were quite certain from his wording that Isaac and Jacob were both meant to be sons of Abraham. For the scroll from India, I would submit that the fact that it was not Jesus's name suggests that another man, either an Arab named Isa/Issa or a Hebrew named Isaac, Isaiah, or Esau once traveled up to India and learned from the monks there.

I like to look into both the physical and spiritual world when making conjecture, and I wonder sometimes if there is something preventing or, at least, discouraging certain types of heresies from comfortably using Jesus's name correctly when assigning Him to their belief systems. Why would I think that? Well, in the face of overwhelming evidence of Jacob's parentage, modern Islamic scholars have changed their minds from earlier times and now lay out the same Abraham-Isaac-Jacob line as the Jews and Christians. Nothing, however, seems capable of turning them from referring to Jesus as "Isa", even though I have known Christians to choose readily and without censure to refer to Jesus as "Yeshua".

Sesame Street Classics!

2010-01-20T19:12:00.003-05:00

This is for the sake of my little daughter, Tricia, who has come to absolutely adore these videos. Just favoriting them on Youtube would be a pain, because they'd be entirely out of order, and I'm tired of having to search them each time I want to play them... which is nearly daily! So without further ado, I display for you the Sesame Street Pinball Machine numbers 2-12!

Isn't that supposed to be 1-12? Haven't found #1 yet.

When the doctor is wrong

2010-01-17T08:26:00.003-05:00

Most mothers of young children will run across this problem at one time or another. It seems that the standard pediatrician office, even the excellent one, still may be behind the times in dealing with child-rearing. Their advice is unlikely to hurt your child, but you still may end up reading the newer publications and gaining quite a different opinion from theirs. What do you do then?

I ran across this problem just a few days ago. My daughter had her nine-month appointment, and they checked her weight and height. Her height was fine by their standards, lying right along the same point in the growth curve as her last appointments. Her weight, however, had barely moved. She had not lost any weight, but she did not gain enough to maintain her point on the curve, or even the point below it.

"We're not concerned yet," the pediatrician told me. "But I would like for you to push solids four or five times daily. Sit her down in her chair and feed her all she'll take. I'm an advocate of breastfeeding, and I breastfed my own children, the last one for two and a half years. But sometimes they just need that extra help. Besides, they say that you need to introduce solids during this time period or the child may become resistant to them."

Fair enough, I suppose. So I took her home and gave it a try.

My first problem was that my baby is not interested in solids. Oh, she loves to eat from a spoon, but she'll only consume an ounce or two before losing interest. To put this into perspective, the baby food jars labeled for her age are six ounce containers. Then, despite having eaten only one ounce of food, she will skip half a nursing session. That means that she loses probably about four ounces of breastmilk for one or two ounces of solids. The calorie count of solids runs from seven calories per ounce for vegetables like carrots or green beans to eighteen calories per ounce for a banana and cereal mixture. The average calorie count for breastmilk is twenty calories per ounce. So this effort is not likely to help her gain any extra weight.

I suppose that many doctors assume that low weight gain after six months on mostly breastmilk is a case of low milk output from the mother, and we will be able to add solids without reducing the amount of nursing sessions. This is not the case for my baby. I'm an overproducer, and she just isn't hungry.

My mother assured me that I underwent the exact same weight change at the exact same age. I told her the doctor's recommendations, and she told me that her doctor had made the exact same recommendation... thirty years ago! She had obediently pushed solids. "Did it work?" I asked. "Did I gain the way they wanted to see?" No, I hadn't, but introducing more solids into my diet hadn't seemed to hurt, either.

This is not the case for my baby, which brings me to the second problem with following the pediatrician's advice. From her earliest days, my baby has been strongly prone to intestinal trouble. Every feeding results in gassiness, and she used to have frequent episodes of reflux. These episodes died down over the past month or two, and I was hoping that the trouble was behind her. Every time I feed her, I sit with her for a while afterwards and help her work the worst of the bubbles out of her body.

Now I'd like to take this moment to clarify that I have not actually refused to start her on solids. In the morning, either I or my mother (if I am working) tries her on a basic, First-Foods item. She'll eat an ounce of it, or, some days, two ounces. It causes her a little bit of intestinal discomfort at times, but not too much. Then, in the late afternoon, she often gets fussy and wants frequent feedings while I'm trying to get supper on the table. I sit her in her chair and give her a handful of Cheerios. She eats most of them, and I get a break to cook and eat!

I took her home from the doctor's office and started her immediately on the solids regimen. On the first day, she ate pretty well, and I thought that this was surely the right thing to do! But on the second day, her appetite had fallen off significantly, and by the third she was in agony for most of the day with stomach trouble and constipation. On the fourth day, she ate very little and then threw up in the evening...

What do you do when the doctor is wrong?

I had a long talk with my mother and with the lactation consultant, and they both told me the same thing I had already guessed in my own heart. This baby is not like the typical bottle-fed baby not moving to the next step quickly enough. This baby is a different case. It's in her genetics to slow her weight gain at this juncture. Her ribs do not show, she has little fat folds on her legs, and she sleeps through the night. She is a very happy, active, healthy baby when she is not having severe intestinal pain. I have been reading about some babies whose intestinal tract mature more slowly than others. Some of them need to be nearly exclusively breastfed for two or three years as they are very slowly transitioned to other foods. Nearly all of them have shed the majority of their difficulties by age six.

Therefore, I am going on record to say that I will not be following my pediatrician's advice. I am going to return to her previous schedule, with a mashed food introduced in the morning and Cheerios (or bread) given in the evening, and I am going to keep breastfeeding her as much as she'll take. Now for the concern... am I going to get into trouble?

In this country, there seems to be a movement towards further government interference in the health of the population, which often translates to further government interference in the raising of young children. Already, doctors can label a child with the dreaded FTT (Failure To Thrive), and that diagnosis can cause a good parent all sorts of trouble if that good parent would rather follow the guidelines of the World Health Organization instead of the conventional wisdom of thirty years ago. Some pediatricians are more proactive than others and will put you in contact with the dreaded Social Services... simply over their disagreement with your method of parenting.

Some pediatrician groups are convinced that they know what's best for your child and you do not. These are the ones who groan when they find out that one or more of your children are homeschooled, because that immediately puts you into a different group entirely, an independent-thinking, intelligent woman who is not likely to follow their advice to the letter if she disagrees with it. Admittedly, sometimes they have cause for concern. At times like this, however, it may simply mean that they become frustrated with the mother's refusal to fit like a cog into the Great Machine.

Now I may be maligning my own pediatric group, so let me state that they have typically taken the individual approach much more kindly than most. I do not foresee being sent to Social Services over the amount of green beans that my baby may not be consuming instead of breastmilk. Still, I find myself making my decision and then preparing for my next appointment as if for battle, to fight for my right to care for this baby in the way I feel best.

Sheeple

2009-11-09T13:35:00.004-05:00

It's been a good couple of days for this old accusation. Let me take a moment and repeat verbatim what I was told on my journal recently:

The sheer fact that you take Rush Limbaugh seriously tells me that I shouldn't pay attention to anything you have to say at all. Thanks for being such a sheeple, and for not actually thinking through what Rush says.

I was thinking about this when I heard that the House had passed a healthcare bill even larger and more dangerous than the one we successfully shot down in town hall meetings earlier this year. It seems that the Stupak Amendment, which prohibits federal funding of abortion in government-run health care, was added to the bill and several blue-dog Democrats decided to vote in favor.

This happened over the weekend, and Rush Limbaugh was not there to tell us poor sheeple what to think. We got the next best thing, however, when the American Family Association (Dr. Dobson's "empire") released a statement on Facebook giving praise that the amendment had been added to the bill. There, we sheeple were told what to think. Right? People like the poster quoted above, would probably think so.

That's not what happened.

The majority of comments were not in agreement with AFA. Within ten minutes, over thirty people had weighed in to explain that the amendment was not a victory, as without it the bill probably would not have passed. These people having been given the cues to cheer, refused. Each one spoke with different wording, and many approached the issue from different angles, making it very unlikely that they were parroting from the same source.

Now, the first Rush Limbaugh show since the vote is running. The transcripts have, of course, not yet been released, but the gist of it is that Rush was talking about the terrorist attack until a caller brought up the healthcare bill. What did the caller say? He said that he wasn't happy about the Stupak amendment merely because it made the healthcare bill a pleasant enough pill for the blue dog Democrats to get on board and pass it.

Think about that for a moment. We sheeple, who are supposed to take our cues from our masters, openly defied one and told another what we thought of the issue before he even brought it up. Isn't that kind of odd behavior for people who can't form an opinion on their own?

Wealth

2009-11-05T09:41:00.003-05:00

It's that time of year again. I watched the enormous truck back into the driveway. My son watched in fascination as a man with a thick, greying beard connected the pipe. Within minutes, our oil tank downstairs displayed its little floater at the top of the gauge, and I was writing out a check. We fill our oil tank twice a year, once around November and once around March. Of course, living in the northern hemisphere in a cold-winter area, we use significantly more oil in the winter months. But that's hardly my point today.

I always get a thrill from filling the oil tank. It's the same thrill I get after a good grocery shopping session, in which there have been a lot of good sales and I have filled my cart. It's the thrill I get when the church giveaway room has several outfits out for the taking, all the right sizes for my children. I simply love having Plenty.

This isn't just an odd quirk of mine, mind you. It's a pretty common human condition. In Western Society, we have the curious desire for sparser homes and thinner women. Throughout history, the cultures have trended in the exact opposite direction, probably because wealth was not nearly as common as it is in the present day. Consider the example of the needy taking pictures of soup kitchens on their cell phones. We hardly understand what poverty really is anymore. I can't claim to truly understand it either. Even when we haven't known if we could fill that oil tank again, we've still had a weathertight house and the expectation that nobody is likely to destroy it in war or for spite anytime soon.

I like to focus on and enjoy the simplest and truest types of wealth. Recently, my family and I sang for a Salvation Army coffeehouse. One of the workers there found out that I have a baby girl and offered me some free diapers. I hesitated, automatically saying what I usually say in similar situations. We'd love the help, and I'll definitely use anything we're given, but I'm sure there are others in more need than us and they should probably be aided first. My mother told me on the drive home that we are in fact 'salt of the earth humble' and probably not much less in need than the other families in that area.

This surprised me, to be sure. In my reckoning, we're doing pretty well. Sure, you can look at us as a family who can't yet afford to replace the carpet as it wears thin, we're basically one major car repair away from disaster, and it would be nice to have enough money in the bank to replace a major appliance should it suddenly die. However, I tend to look at the plenty. I look at the pantry piled high with consumables, the lovely big yard, the clothing so plentiful that we can afford to toss pilly t-shirts and holed socks...

...and the filled oil tank, ready to give us heat and hot water all winter long.

Last year, it was only the sudden dip in oil prices that allowed us to fill that tank at all. We're in better shape this year, thanks to the mortgage refinancing done before Obama's plans made the process nearly impossible for anyone who hasn't missed a payment. My baby's hospital bills are all paid off, and we're starting to put money back into savings.

Still, I'm never going to take a filled oil tank for granted again.

So simple, even a housewife can understand

2009-10-09T10:23:00.005-04:00

This feels strange. These days, I read the news, and I immediately spot the flaws in the Democrats' plans. I do not own a business. I have had no formal education in business. My bachelor's degree is in Computer Science, for heaven's sake. Yet still, I can read these proposals, and the flaws show as clear as day for me. Is there something unusual about me, or about them?

Today's beauty comes from a Reuters article that I picked up from Newsmax:

Democrats are looking at the possibility of a windfall profits tax on insurance companies as part of healthcare reform, House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday.

Pelosi said she had asked House Ways and Means Committee chairman Charles Rangel to examine the possibility and report back to her.

"This is very preliminary," she told reporters.

But she added that insurance companies would get some 50 million new consumers, many subsidized by taxpayers, under reforms Democrats are planning and "we think they can put more on the table."

Okay, it doesn't take a genius to put this plan together. We're talking about switching out the public option (at least in part) for taxpayer-subsidized private options, kind of like what Congress has... but not quite as posh. It seems they want to keep from raising taxes on the middle class by doing it to the insurance companies instead.

This sets up a neat bit of circular logic.

Only a fool would consider it a victory to let someone else take his profits and use them to buy his product.

Remember that profit is what's left after you have paid for your supplies and paid your workers. It's the part that you get to keep for yourself. It's a percentage, sometimes a small percentage, of what your actual product costs. In this plan, you are only going to recover a small percentage of what was taken away.

Now we've had some discussions about profit. Where does it actually go? It pays the salary of the business owner. So technically, if you earn $25,000 per year as a business owner, you have a profit margin of $25,000. In this society, however, it is also paid out in percentages to stockholders. Who owns stock in the company? Why, anybody can own stock, including the workers, who often are given stock as part of their pay.

If your salary is being decreased by the government and you need more money, the only way to do it is to lower your costs or raise the price of your product.

So where will this "windfall tax" money be coming from? Part of it will come from the CEO's salary, and I am sure that's what the Democratic Party is claiming as the source of the entire tax. In truth, only part, probably a small part, will come from there. The rest of the money will come from the middle and lower class in the form of raised premiums, lower stock returns, and fewer workers employed.

Yet again, the Democrat plan basically involves taking from us to spend on us... retaining a percentage for their own purposes, of course. It's a scam, and as scams go it may look good on the surface, but it is fundamentally flawed.

I'm just bewildered that it seems so obvious to me. After all, I am not one of the elite ruling class that the Democrats deem capable of making my own financial decisions. How can I be clever enough to understand the problems with the way they want to spend my money?

Short thought on labor unions and feminism

2009-09-15T11:43:00.005-04:00

As the modern woman tries to "have it all" and ends up with nothing, people are beginning to realize more and more the importance of "mother-friendly" work. The truth is, no matter how much feminists try to push women into high-profile careers, the majority of women continue to want their own children.

The feminists use the phrase "barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen," though it has greatly outlived its usefulness. The woman shrieking it in fury still thinks that it refers to a woman who is unable to go anywhere, using up her life in making her husband pleased while toiling endlessly over a hot stove. The average woman in touch with the real world pictures an idyllic moment of relaxation, connecting with the unborn dancing within while feasting upon a much-craved bowl of fresh-picked strawberries and cream, as opposed to trying to force her attention on company business as her pregnant body's feet swell uncomfortably inside rigid formal shoes and the only strawberries in sight are either freeze-dried or cost $5 for a small bowlful in the cafeteria.

The truth is that though women want children and are told that they should desire a career, the majority of actual work available for them is not child-friendly. The boss worries over how this little nuisance will impact the department's performance, while the woman looks forward to using a mechanical pump in the bathroom with a picture of her baby, who is in the care of some other woman being paid half of the mother's earnings. Working mothers have it tough. I should know... I was one out of necessity for a while, and as working mothers go, I had it easy.

How can we deal with this situation? Currently, a variety of possible solutions involve more and more regulation... rules that you can't fire a pregnant woman for being pregnant, rules that she must be given a certain amount of time in which her job is held open but empty, rules that she must be able to use "flex time" to be there when her children get off the bus, even if it means that she spends a cold and lonely Saturday making up her time.

I have a different suggestion.

Remove a few layers of regulation instead of adding more.

Why do so many women work full-time when so many want to work part-time? Part-time is getting harder and harder for employers to manage. A few years ago, I worked as a "casual employee" as a computer programmer. I was paid a set amount per hour, and that was it. No benefits. No holidays. No sick time. No vacation time. No health insurance. No retirement fund. Nothing but a simple wage for hours worked.

That situation is very, very difficult to find nowadays, thanks to a mixture of labor unions and employment law. Generally, hiring someone involves paying a salary plus significantly more for all the associated benefits. Places that seek to minimize their costs by hiring multiple part-timers without benefits are vilified, and they are becoming rare.

However, this is the perfect situation for the working mother. In most cases, her husband is working full-time and providing the family with everything from retirement coverage to medical insurance coverage. She doesn't need paid holidays. She doesn't need stock in the company. She just needs to put in a few hours when she can, to help fill in the gaps in the family budget.

I can see the justification of benefits in full-time jobs, which are usually worked by a wage-earner looking to provide for his family. Nowadays, a hefty percentage of the workforce are 'supplementary earners', and they should not be treated the same way.

The President circumvents parental authority?

2009-09-02T10:00:00.003-04:00

On September 8th, President Obama is planning to address schools across our nation.

Now we don't know what he's going to say yet, and having the President talk to kids is not necessarily an evil thing. It's good to teach children about our country and its political process. When I was young, I wrote a letter to President Reagan. I got a lovely little courtesy book with full-color pictures of the White House most famous rooms. I have it to this day.

However, we do not know what this community organizer plans to say to our children. There is no copy circulating of the speech that I can find. The one document I was able to find, a teaching guide for the event, did not inspire confidence that this would be a simple, friendly hello. The guide can be found here.

For those of you who don't want to read it, these are the parts that trouble me:

Before the speech, third point: Why is it important that we listen to the President and other elected officials, like the mayor, senators, members of congress, or the governor? Why is what they say important?

Indeed, why is what they say important? In this country, the government is created for the people and by the people. Of course it's important to listen to what they have to say. But why is that? Do you think that the teachers will encourage students to answer that they should become involved in the political process so that they can do their best to intelligently evaluate the truthfulness of their President's speeches and speak out against them if he is wrong?

During the speech, second point: Students can record important parts of the speech where the President is asking them to do something. Students might think about: What specific job is he asking me to do? Is he asking anything of anyone else? Teachers? Principals? Parents? The American people?

This troubles me, because it is basically evidence that, when our President speaks to our children outside of our presence, he will be asking them to do something. What sort of thing will he ask them to do? What was the last thing he asked people to do? The last thing he asked people to do was to go to town hall meetings specifically to shut up the people who disagreed with his nationalized health care plan.

Some people might say, "What's the big deal? So the kids have to sit through this speech. They'll probably be bored. They'll have forgotten it by tomorrow. Just let it happen and let it fade away." Unfortunately, the teacher's guide includes a followup:

Extension of the speech, second point: Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals.

Everyone should find this troubling. The President is encouraging children to work for him directly, and encouraging teachers to put a system into place by which children are made accountable for their goals. I would like to point out that in our system of government, children are traditionally considered too young to enter into contracts and have them enforced. There is a reason why, for instance, there are minimum ages on marriage and on entering the Armed Forces. Further points on the same section encourage teachers to set up school-wide incentive programs for students who reach their goals and graph student progress toward these goals.

This is no longer about a student sitting through a speech and then going home. It's about peer pressure and adult pressure for a student to do what the President has asked them to do. This is serious business, whether you approve of Mr. President or not. We do not live in an authoritarian society, and our elected leaders of the country should not be directly interfering with our children's lives in this fashion.

Quite simply, this is wrong.

I personally have no worries about this event for my family. My son is homeschooled and my daughter is too young to understand speeches. Still, I would like to encourage parents of public school students to keep their children home on September 8th. If enough people do so, perhaps we can send a message.

Now let me put in my "usual disclaimer". Suppose the President merely wants to ask the students to be more charitable? To help others? Isn't this a good thing? Don't we want our children to help others? Yes, we do! We definitely do, and I entirely agree with the goal in mind. What I disagree with strongly is its implementation. Children should be charitable because their parents and community teaches them to be. Charting progress toward charity goals should be done at home, or perhaps in Sunday School. Children should not learn the lesson that they must do whatever their President requests of them. That is the road, not to genuine charity, but to tyranny and despotism.

How dare you question my wisdom?

2009-08-09T14:13:00.003-04:00

It looks as if town hall meetings are no longer meant to give us a forum in which to express our concerns and hear lawmakers try to support their decisions. It is now a forum in which the lawmakers tell us what we are going to roll over and allow them to do. It is no longer a place of persuasion and debate, but a place of demands and coercion. What happened?

Well, apparently Obama got tired of hearing people object to his plan, and so he rustled up his union buddies to go attend these town hall meetings. The result: Thursday night featured the first bouts of actual violence in the entire government-run healthcare debate.

A note about the protestors and town hall participants: They raised their voices. They held signs. They chanted sometimes. That's it. They are not violent people. They are not terrorists. They're people like you and me. The initial town hall meetings reminded me a bit of heavy metal fans. Now that probably sounds like an odd correlation to make. Let me explain it.

My sister and I attended a heavy metal concert with a couple of other friends. We found ourselves, country mice on a long journey, in the part of Poughkeepsie where the cops don't go, in line with a bunch of people (mostly men) wearing black leather, chains, spikes, ponytails, and various piercings. To hear the major news media reporting on town hall protests, you'd think these people had attended them. You might not be off the mark.

Why? Because they turned out to be the friendliest, gentlest, most respectable and respectful people you could hope to share an auditorium with. Imagine this: at a standing-room-only concert, I tried to step forward to get a better look at the band. The people in the audience readily parted for me, giving me an excellent view close to the stage. You could get bumped into in a crowd like that, but not without an exchange of "I'm sorry" and "Excuse me" and "That's alright". There were a couple of bouncers on hand, who were not needed. There was no violence, no trampling, no accidental injury, and the fans even left the place clean as it was when they arrived.

From what I have seen and heard of the town meetings, the people were very much like that. They would rail and shout, but nobody was getting trampled, nobody was getting separated from their group, and nobody was getting frightened... except for the Democrats up on stage, who are not used to having their wisdom questioned and did not know how to deal with well-reasoned opposition from the people who are supposed to follow like sheep.

Then Obama spoke up. He sent out emails to his supporters asking them to show up at the town hall meetings to shout down the protesters. This act made apparent that he was not looking for actual discussion. At the absolute best, he was hoping for a photo-op of people not disagreeing with his plan. Oh, he got a photo-op alright. The pictures and video taken of the violence has hit Youtube and, as the phrase goes, "gone viral". (This despite having not hit the major news media in any way except a vague sort of "there was violence between opposing groups" without revealing who was actually throwing people against walls.)

Now I've heard people raise various possibilities of why Thursday night's violence happened. The kindest opinion, however, is just as bad as the least kind. The least kind opinion is pretty obvious. Many people believe that Barry Obama, Chicago politician, purposely rounded up the union people in order to intimidate and attack the town hall attendees. They account the violence, which resulted in torn shirts, bruising, and one man beaten into the hospital, directly to his fault. They view him as a modern-day crime boss telling his minions to go out there and break a few knees.

The kindest opinion is that Obama is so blindingly inept at the only job he has any real experience in, community organizing, that he simply did not know what happens when you ask union officials to get their guys to show up and provide a counter to a protest. Despite my adventures to places like heavy metal concerts, I have grown up in a fairly sheltered community, among Christians and homeschoolers, in a rural neighborhood. Even I knew exactly what was going to happen once union thugs got involved in this wasn't-yet-a-mess. If even a rural Connecticut housewife knows how they behave, how could an urban community organizer and Chicago politician have no clue whatsoever?

Of course, this raises serious questions about our president. Is he utterly inept and astonishingly naive? Or is he purposely intimidating ordinary citizens with the only means of force that will target innocent people? Note that these first clashes were not against police (who were already monitoring the protests long before Thursday) or military (who have not been called in), but union people proudly wearing their union shirts.

In either case, it seems that the one thing the Democrats do not want us to do is to object to their plans. They are not interested in compromise; they are not even interested in our opinion. Now we find out whether they can strong-arm the American People into backing down and giving them their own way. If this issue is decided by force, our way of life just might be over.

We value your input

2009-08-06T11:36:00.003-04:00

"There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov."

This simple statement has set off a firestorm across the country, among just about everybody who opposes the Democrat-proposed government-run health care plan, which is a majority, and even among some who support the plan. Some have argued that the White House plans to make an 'enemies list' by identifying people who disagree with them. Others have scoffed at the notion, noting that we have not currently lost the right to free speech. One person said, "Has it ever occurred to you knuckle-dragging sheep that he just wants your input?"

I immediately answered, "No."

I find myself once more in the "middle of the right". I do not believe that the original intent of this post was to mark conservatives for destruction. I don't think we'll be wearing little yellow stars on our coats anytime soon. After all, we outnumber him, and the military is majority-conservative. Even the liberal members would not fire on their own, and yes, I have heard that many of them are already considering what they would do if they were asked. The atmosphere is that volatile. Still, as I said, I don't take the worst possible interpretation of the White House request.

Even so, the nicest possible interpretation is not good. I answered "No" because Obama has not shown any interest whatsoever in changing his bill to meet our concerns. He has merely claimed that he wants to hear them so that he can refute them, so that he can explain them away, so that we will 'see the light' and stop opposing his plan. I also noted that the original forum poster listed a fact and a group of people were heartily agreeing with it, while Obama was trying to force something down our throats that we don't want "for our own good". Who was treating us like "knuckle-dragging sheep"? As you might have guessed, I was a little riled.

I have good reason to be. Under ordinary circumstances it would be nothing more than a poor choice of wording. However, with this administration, we have to look at it with the 'abusive-boyfriend principle' I noted in my previous post. "Joe the Plumber" opposed Obama's plans within Obama's earshot and look what happened to him. Then we got the Homeland Security memo that labeled those who peaceably assemble to protest liberal policies as "terrorist-lite". Now Obama wants to know what YOU think of his plan. Of course, his request has a nasty little Orwellian twist to it.

The White House blog could have said: "We understand that you have some concerns about the plan. Please feel free to send those concerns to this address so that we can address them." We're not fools, and we'd still know that he was interested more in denying our concerns than incorporating language into the bill to put our minds at ease. It still would have been an improvement over what was said, which basically amounts to this:

"We want you to send us logs of private conversations you've had with people who oppose this bill."

The same person who called me a knuckle-dragging sheep claimed that Obama was only looking for our opinion. I replied, "If you want our opinion, ask us to send in OUR opinion! Don't ask people to send in their NEIGHBOR's opinions!" That wording alone, even without the example of "Joe the Plumber", is enough to rattle a generation who grew up learning how Things Were Done in the Soviet Union. If a secretly-recorded conversation is submitted in a court case, the judge must rule whether it is admissible as evidence. Shouldn't there be some sort of consideration taken before asking people to basically submit private conversations to the Federal Government?

This nation, God love 'em, is still full of the same types of personalities who stood up to the British long ago. It is still full of people who emigrated here to escape totalitarian regimes. I have heard from a number of people who have chosen to send their own concerns about the White House request for other people's private conversations straight to that email. I am going to join them and send this post...

...but I'll use my spam-catcher email address.

The Government Relationship

2009-08-04T19:04:00.003-04:00

This thought has been percolating in my head all day. I don't know if I have enough of it to put out a long, nicely-reasoned post, but I would like to get it out there for you anyways. It's been a long day with a tired baby, so if I get short and incomprehensible, please leave me a comment and I'll fix it!

Conservatives are starting to bring up things that Obama and other Democrats have said in the past regarding taxpayer-funded, single-payer healthcare. Most of it has gone along the lines of "We won't be able to do it to them right away because they'd never accept it, but be sure that we're starting a process if we regain Congress and the White House!" Meanwhile, liberals are complaining mightily that it doesn't conclusively prove anything. That last part, about conclusively proving, is the point.

See, the Scientific Method and the criminal court system are very good and useful in their place. However, they can be overused and often are in modern society. You have to prove your religious beliefs by the Scientific Method or they're invalid. You have to prove your political stance by the Innocent-Until-Proven-Guilty method... only when you're going up against the liberal Democrats, of course. However, you shouldn't need to go that far to oppose new legislation. After all, our government was built in such a way as to make it difficult to pass a new law.

As a woman, I have a certain frame of reference that I use when considering liberal Democrat promises about the health care plan. (This is, by the way, a government-run health care plan meant to fix a private medical insurance issue, not a "public health care option" or a medical insurance fix to a medical insurance issue. Anyways.) My frame of reference is that of a woman seeking to avoid becoming a victim of domestic abuse.

You learn quickly, or you end up learning by experience. You can't try too hard to prove conclusively and without a shadow of a doubt that the guy is going to hit you. You can't analyze him through the scientific method or put him on trial to deliver a guilty verdict only if you are convinced beyond all reasonable doubt. You have to be on your guard, and you have to keep your eyes open.

See, if you confront him directly, you bet he'll say, "Oh no, baby, I would never hurt you." But if he's been rough and physical, pushed you around a little, if he's told his friends he'd smack around any woman of his who didn't get his dinner on time, if he's been known to hit previous girlfriends... you had better start making tracks now. Don't move in with him. For heaven's sake don't have sex with him.

When I view the evidence presented that the liberals are taking us on a trip towards a truly socialist system, that this is just the first step and groundwork is being laid for more, I can't take for granted their claims that it just isn't so. I can't assume that they won't use a power that their bill is giving them just because they said they won't use it. After all, Obama said that he didn't want to run auto companies, and see where that's taken us.

I don't need the proof of the scientific method, or the guilty verdict in a criminal case, to hesitate at handing over the power of my health and life to the government. All I need is about the same level of suspicion that would prompt me to back away from a potentially abusive boyfriend.

Schooling Decision #2 - Homeschool

2009-08-03T12:02:00.002-04:00

Yes, folks, it's that time of year again. Students are gearing up for their next year of school. My son finished his Kindergarten through the CLASS plan last year, and they mailed back an S for Satisfactory. The only grade you get in Kindergarten from CLASS is an S or a U. Guess what U stands for.

So what's up for this year? Well, my son is still doing a good job learning how to socialize. He isn't doing quite as well in keeping his room clean, but compared to other kids his age, it's not that bad. We're working on some defiance issues, and that's utterly normal. Basically, I've got a kid I can take out to dinner, and that's pretty cool. We had him professionally evaluated earlier this summer, and he was declared to be right on the line between ADHD and not ADHD. That didn't surprise me. He's flighty in the mind, but he's a solidly good worker. Easily distracted, but very intelligent.

It probably will come to no surprise to my regular readers that we have decided to continue homeschooling. The method, though, is slightly different. This year, we ordered the CLASS First Grade Family Plan. What's the difference? With the CLASS Plan, we send the work in and they give us his grade. With the Family Plan, we give him the grades ourselves. We send nothing back. Basically, they send us a full curriculum and a lovely Year Planner for homeschoolers (containing weekly planning sheets and myriads of forms from field trips to doctor's office visits) and we're on our own.

I noticed last year that my son has a bit of difficulty getting a real handle on history as something that actually happened long ago. We happen to live in lovely New England, and there are several historical sites for him to visit and actually experience history. I plan to incorporate history-based field trips heavily into his curriculum this year.

CLASS allows you to make some course substitutions for each year. I took the A Beka option for reading and science. I like the old classic readers A Beka offers, and the science book has an extra section on toys that I know will please my mechanically-minded boy. This is really what homeschooling is all about. Each child can have a curriculum that, while it covers the basics in full, will also play to his strengths and interests while shoring up his weaknesses. He'll also have all the drills and memorization that makes up a classic education, and arrive in highschool able to do his multiplication problems without a calculator.

This week I am going to be concentrating on planning out the school year. Each book needs to be divided into chapters and decisions have to be made as to how many days per week, how much per day will be done. The primary homeschooling parent, usually the mother, makes this choice. She must balance each day so that daily subjects and weekly subjects will all be completed without burning out her kid. Again, each child has a custom-tailored education key to his strengths and weaknesses. My son tires quickly when doing phonics, and there are a lot of pages in his book. I decided to start him on his new book in June, so that he can do one page every day and finish on time. He tires much less quickly with math, but there is a lot of work to do between his workbook, drill sheets, and tests, so I have started him on that subject already. "Summer school? What a bummer!" Seriously, one phonics page and two math pages is not a terrible fate. When he's in a good mood, he can complete all his summer schoolwork for the day in one hour.

Of course, we have a complication this year in the form of a baby. Lil Tricia is fussier than most. She likes to be held, and she has a tendency to soak up a lot of time. This can be dealt with. Most homeschooling mothers have breastfed and administered lessons at the same time. Homeschooling with multiple children becomes a balancing act, when you must not only work out each child's schedule, but correlate them so that one has busywork while you teach another. If you have many children close in age, this job is actually easier than you might think. History and science rarely take on significant differences between grades until highschool, and homeschooled children are often above their peers in reading comprehension. A second grader, third grader, and fifth grader can all learn from the same sixth-grade science or history book at the same time.

Of course, this doesn't quite apply to me yet. I will be sitting the baby up while listening to a lesson read aloud, playing with the baby while my son is doing his busywork, and discussing lessons with my son while the baby either plays with her toes or sleeps. It's going to be an adventure, but I wouldn't give it up for the world.

First grade subjects are theology, phonics, reading, spelling, handwriting, mathematics, science, history, art, music, and gym. I've got a handle on just about each item on the list. His history book is short and will only cover about half the year. Last year, I just started him late in the year, so that his amount of daily schoolwork slowly ramped up as he got used to this new system in his life. This year, I found a third grade History of United States book that I am going to read to him for the second half of the year. It might be a little over his head at times, but it'll be good for him.

I'm not worried about art. I used to teach it to my younger sister when I was a homeschooled student, and I've used it to keep kids happy while watching them for years. Music shouldn't be much of a problem. My mother agreed to start teaching him piano lessons. (I could do it myself, if I needed to, but I think it's good for him to have other teachers.) That will involve learning how to read music. Last year I taught him how to identify strings, brass, winds, and percussion by ear. (Not the individual instruments.) I also exposed him to the audio-only Peter and the Wolf. I know I ought to put him through an actual music appreciation course in time and teach him the names of the greats and so on. For now, though, the piano lessons should suffice.

It's gym that I am still trying to plan. I'm not much of a sports person. He gets plenty of exercise, but not much in the way of traditional active games. My mother loves taking him on bicycle rides, and he and I take plenty of walks, but I'm not the right person to teach him how to hit a ball or make a basket, and he needs to learn how to play in a team. He gets some of that in his weekly kids' group, but not like he'd get it from a gym class. What does a kid really need in the area of gym class? What will help him be a well-rounded kid? How can I be sure that I meet that need? I was easy. I was so anti-athletic that my mother could meet my need easily just by keeping me in shape. My son is so full of energy and good hand-eye coordination that he is going to need more than I personally can give him.

I'll talk to other homeschool parents in the area, including my mother, and we'll work something out. For the sake of those who like to learn more about homeschooling, when we've figured it out, I'll tell you what we've planned.

Clunkers for Cash: Subsidy for the Rich

2009-07-31T09:14:00.005-04:00

I'd like to take a moment and complain heartily about the Clunkers for Cash program. In case you haven't heard, it allows you to get something like up to $4,500 from the government if your old car is sufficiently fuel-inefficient and it is replaced with a tidy little econobox... brand new, of course. And that is where my problem lies.

Just to clarify my wider stance, I disagree with the program itself on the simple basis that I do not believe the government should be using my taxpayer dollars to pay people for the cars that they drive. This is not a matter of national defense or the simple running of the government. It is not a matter of ensuring the uncoerced determination of value that runs a good free market economy. However, even were I to agree with the program and with the government's administering of it, I can still find a problem with what it does and for whom.

If you are going to buy a new car, you need one of two things: a bank account containing the money for a new car, or enough room in your budget for a monthly payment. My family has neither. I continue to wonder how we would be classified economically. My husband works a middle-class job, technically. Since I do not work full-time (I purposely took a job with lower earning power than I actually have, because it is family-friendly), our household income is less than half of what you might expect from a family with college-educated parents. Anyways, the relevancy to this topic is that we have neither sufficient savings to buy a new car nor the room in our monthly budget to make payments on a new car.

Therefore, Cars for Clunkers automatically does absolutely nothing for us.

Recently, my husband's car permanently died. It was a '90 Cutlass Ciera that we bought six years ago for $500, and though it technically still runs, its problems include brake line failure, a rusty gas tank beginning to leak, a transmission that downshifts as if it's going to drop out of the vehicle, and a myriad of mysterious oil leaks. It garnered, on average, 15-20mpg.

We took all of our savings and purchased an '01 Honda Civic. Despite having higher mileage than the car we are replacing, it looks as if it has at least five more years of life in it. My husband reports fuel economy in the neighborhood of 50mpg, but that is only an estimate, since he has not had to fill the gas tank yet.

My car is an '89 Chevy Cavalier station wagon. As of right now, it has no mechanical problems, just a few cosmetic 'quirks'. The body is finally rusting, and I hope it can hold together until we can afford its replacement. If it doesn't keep running for another three or four years at least, we may be stuck with one car, which is tougher than it sounds when you live at least 3 miles away from any non-residential building.

If the Honda Civic was a new vehicle, we would surely qualify for Cash for Clunkers. Unfortunately, we don't have the money to buy a new vehicle. Even the least expensive new vehicle, after the government rebate, would be at least twice what we paid for the Honda. If the program worked for used cars, we could have just about paid for the Honda with the rebate and still had our little nest egg to use when my car gives up its ghost.

But I've learned a long time ago that the government, when run by Liberals, doesn't care about people like us.

The kicker is this: Since we are not too poor to pay taxes, the government will be taking money that we could have used to save for our car fund and using it to pay people who earn more than we do so that they can buy their brand-new cars for less.

Liberals often wonder how anybody below the upper-middle-class could possibly disagree with their social programs. I'm here to explain that this is just one of many examples that formed my anti-socialist bent.

If the government trying to help troubled Americans save the economy results in lower-class Americans paying for upper-class Americans to drive brand new cars, what will the government trying to help troubled Americans afford health care do to us?

Let's show them how we do things in cyberspace!

2009-07-25T10:17:00.002-04:00

http://www.rollcall.com/issues/55_12/news/37125-1.html?type=printer_friendly

Congressional rules for franked mail bar Members from using taxpayer-funded mail for newsletters that use “partisan, politicized or personalized” comments to criticize legislation or policy.

The dispute over Brady’s chart is being reviewed by the franking commission, which must approve any mail before it can be sent. No decision had been made on the matter by press time.

Brady adamantly denied that the chart was misleading and said Democrats are simply threatened by the content of the graphic.

“I think their review was laughable,” Brady said. “It’s ... downright false in most of the cases. The chart depicts their health care plan as their committees developed it.”

“The chart reveals how their health care bureaucracy works, and people are frightened by it,” he added. “So this is their effort to try and discredit” the chart.

Republican Members have made 20 requests to mail a version of the chart to their constituents and have been told that the requests are being delayed while the commission reviews allegations that the chart is misleading.

...
The dispute centers on a chart (view PDF) created by Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) and Republican staff of the Joint Economic Committee to illustrate the organization of the Democratic health care plan.

At first glance, Brady’s chart resembles a board game: a colorful collection of shapes and images with a web of lines connecting them.

But a closer look at the image reveals a complicated menagerie of government offices and programs that Republicans say will be created if the leading Democratic health care plan becomes law.

UPDATE: Congressman Carter's Twitter confirms this report in the blogosphere: The Democrats are blocking free speech in the House. We can not use the words "Democrats" or "Government Run Healthcare" in official mail.

**************************************************
I say let's show this "government of transparency" what happens when they try to block Republicans from showing us what's really going on. Please feel free to post/spread this on your own blog and/or email, complete with link to the PDF file. After the fiasco surrounding the DVD encryption key, the Democrats should know that you can't just hide things from the citizenry anymore.

If Cars Were People

2009-07-21T06:30:00.002-04:00

I was honestly on my way to write this idea when a fellow blogger wrote this far better than I ever could. So without further ado, here is friday's description of health insurance... for cars...

My fellow Americans, we have a crisis in our nation. We have people driving around across this bountiful land with their engine light on, their oil light on, and no muffler. We have people who have to choose between going another 1,000 miles between oil changes or buying dinner. There have been stories told of people watering down their anti-freeze, disconnecting their O2 sensor, and some never changing their air filter because our auto repair industry is corrupt, overpriced, and needs reform.

These are the facts: Most employers do not provide their employees with adequate auto insurance. Most auto insurance is unaffordable and only covers accidents. Some auto insurance only pays for the other person's car in the case of an accident.

The fact is, lack of comprehensive auto insurance, including insurance for minor repairs and routine maintenance, is the leading cause of death in this country*. Most repair jobs are drastic and overpriced because Americans could not afford routine maintenance. Many people are forced to take public transportation, or walk to work which costs them their jobs or results in them dying of exposure. If we provided comprehensive auto insurance and repairs to every American, we could actually save money by preventing the need for drastic repairs.

Now, I know the opposition thinks we should keep the status quo. They say we should do nothing, let the chips fall where they may. Well, I tell you that we are a generous nation and auto care is a right, not just something for the privileged few rich people in our country. It makes no sense, in our rich country, for Americans to be going without proper brake fluid levels.

It is time to introduce a public option for auto insurance and repairs. It is time to make sure that every American is able to live and work and drive without having to worry where their next fillup will come from or if they will be able to survive if their alternator dies.

Now, I don't want to run the auto insurance or repair industry. That should be up to the private sector. That is why I am proposing a government funded public auto insurance and repair program that anyone can subscribe to and it will be subsidized and free for many. Some people say that this is socialist. That's ridiculous. I don't have time to run the auto repair industry. A public option won't undercut or replace private insurers, it will just compete with them at a far lower subsidized price.

To pay for it, we will cut funding to public transportation. This will save us billions of dollars. We will also tax gasoline additives, racing tires, tinted windows and performance products that cause people to take unnecessary risks and add unnecessary wear and tear on their vehicles. We will put together a computer database of every driver with their tickets, average mileage, and other factors to determine the best treatment of their vehicles. If they drive too fast, we won't pay for certain repairs. Also, to cut costs in the repair industry we won't allow for repairs on vehicles over 15 years old or 200,000 miles. Every year you will have to provide proof or auto insurance or you and your employer will each be taxed an additional 8% of your salary. These measures will make universal auto insurance and repairs deficit neutral.

To ensure high quality of repairs, anyone who works on a car in the public or private arena must have a federal license and at least 6 years of college education in automotive studies. Now, I don't want to choose your mechanic for you, so as long as you pick the most local, experienced mechanic matched to you by our database, you can have any mechanic you want.

Right now our automotive repair industry is worse than most third world countries**! This is America. I hope we can change this. I know we can do better and end the status quo. Please submit your ideas and questions via youtube.com, and we will give a prize of $2,500 to the individual who submits the question that best illustrates why we need universal auto care.

We must pass this quickly. America is relying on us and every day more cars die and more people die because of it. We can't afford not to reform our auto insurance and repair industry.

*Taking into account deaths caused by faulty auto repairs, automobile accidents, possible exposure caused by walking, suicides potentially related to not having a car, suicides with a car, deaths in subway systems and public transportation apparatus and global warming deaths.

**Taking into account total number of repairs, average cost for repairs, and how long individuals keep their cars before selling them.

Demystifying the "Messiah"

2009-07-15T07:26:00.005-04:00

Folks, the Republican Party made a crucial mistake when Obama appeared on the scene as Democratic candidate for President. I would have warned of this earlier, had I fully realized the import of the mistake. Now it's done, and he's in office, and there is not much we can do beyond letting the Democrats own their own errors in policy and gearing up for a conservative sweep in 2010.

(The irony is that a Democratic president with a Republican congress may be the best balance for our country. He keeps them in line by vetoing compromises because they don't go far enough, and the media finds themselves railing against a nebulous group of a couple hundred people instead of focusing a laser-eye on one man.)

This is the error: The Democrats have done their best to make him seem different somehow, special, unusual and new. The Republicans have only helped.

The first black president! Barack Obama! The unspoken 'Hussein' vibrates through the crowd. Is he Muslim? Is he Kenyan? Is he American? What about his birth certificate? What about his policies? Whatever he is, he's new. He's different. He isn't the same ol'. He just might get us out of this mess.

Even the Republican's attempts to cast doubt on him has only strengthened his position as a mystical figure. McCain's attempts to be 'gentlemanly' and avoid the infamous middle name left it as the proverbial (and ironic) elephant in the room, the silent reminder each time he avoided it that it was indeed waiting there. The grassroots concern about Obama's Muslim heritage draws our minds to the Middle East, to strange beliefs and unusual laws. None of this is what President Obama truly is, but it has only helped to cement his image as not quite the ordinary politician.

Before the election, people kept asking me if I thought Obama was Muslim. I took an honest look at his policies and as much of his home life as we were able to see and said no. I thought (and still think) he is merely a Unitarian Universalist, just like the church he attended for 20 years. The Unitarian Universalist church, though members may vary widely in their beliefs, is not like the Catholic church or the Baptist church. Their belief system is more like a buffet table than a simple dinner or a seven-course meal. They pick and choose as they please from various religious beliefs, including Christianity. In this way, though some members are likely fully Christian, the denomination is only Christian by the same "one drop" logic that makes Obama black instead of "mixed race".

See, a Muslim, even a secret one, in office would not be governing the way Obama is governing. "But he may be a moderate! Just because his wife doesn't wear the garment and he doesn't pray to Mecca... he's in hiding!" I'm sorry, but my evidence isn't anywhere near that obvious. Everyone, whether they hide their religion or not, is influenced by its worldview. Muslims are so careful about debt management that stock/bond packages featuring Muslim-approved companies are actually popular in the U.S. because these packages are among the few who are not rapidly losing value in this crisis caused by irresponsible financing. A Muslim Obama would not have sought to deal with debt by creating tons more. A Muslim Obama would not be supporting abortion under every circumstance at any time. A Muslim Obama may not require his wife to wear a hijab, but he sure as heck wouldn't want her to go walking about with bare arms. (She's drawn criticism for that, so let me be clear: I do not share that criticism. I think it's fine if she wants to go sleeveless. I have zero problem with it. But it's far, far outside of Muslim decency mores even for a moderate.)

Now, I knew that Obama was the senator from Illinois. Still, it never sunk into my mind, because the Democrats kept emphasizing that he was from Hawaii and the Republicans kept emphasizing that he was from Kenya. Hawaii is exotic and Kenya more so. Whether you are excited or alarmed by either setting, it still adds to the mystique. A Chicago Politician doesn't carry nearly the same level of interest, yet that is what he is.

This is important. When you take Barack (Hussein) Obama, born in Hawaii and possibly secretly Muslim, you have a mysterious character. Add his policy decisions, which don't seem to fall into any pattern, and you have a very confusing man. Even his detractors don't seem to know what to do with him. However, when you take Barry Obama, the Chicago politician, everything he's done makes perfect sense. And we know what to do with Chicago politicians.

So unlike some conservative bloggers, I do not encourage you to refer to this man as Barack Hussein Obama in order to reveal the truth and dispel the mystique. Instead, I encourage you, as Dumbledore referred to "The Dark Lord", not even as "Voldemort", but simply as "Tom Riddle", to call our new president "Barry Obama". President Barry Obama, the liberal Chicago politician and Universalist Unitarian. Say this before reading any of his policies or stances, and everything else will fall right into place.

Loving our healthcare system

2009-06-22T13:47:00.002-04:00

So I called the hospital in trepidation to discuss payment options for what my private insurance didn't cover in my daughter's birth. I gave the woman the account numbers, and she quoted me a very reasonable monthly payment and told me that if I needed it lower, they had another company they could outsource me to. I asked her if I could start next month, as everything beyond food/electricity/etc. for this month had gone to a car repair, and she said I could. I told her I could make these payments and thanked her for her help.

My hospital stay was excellent. Due to complications during the birth, the staff had to act quickly, professionally, and competently. They did. As a result, in a situation where babies have died or been brain-damaged, mine came out perfectly healthy. (They accelerated delivery under the correct suspicion that the cord was around her neck. She came out blue, but did not need resuscitation and shows no sign of oxygen deprivation.)

Thanks to our current healthcare system, and I admit it could use some work, I was able to afford the best of care. That's right, this working-class/lower-middle-class (how do I figure out which one I'm in?) was given access to the best medical care. There was no tier system, like they have in Holland, in which lower-wage workers have lesser levels of coverage. There was no government decision on whether my baby was viable enough to deserve care, as there is in England. There was no lack of diagnostic machinery, as there is in Canada.

Why on earth would I be interested in Obama patterning our healthcare after any of these countries? The way things are now, the lower class (as long as they aren't unfortunate enough to fall under the government care that liberals want to expand for all of us) can afford and receive medical care. The trick is that you have to be willing to do as I have done, to call, to explain what you can pay, and to set up a plan. You have to be willing to talk to them and let them know of your situation. The help is readily there, if you care to... 'Look' may be too strong a word. If you care to even speak.

I said before that it could use some help. I can think of two models that would be an improvement over the current setup.

Auto insurance is mandatory (in my state), but you can choose whichever company you like. Since it isn't linked to your employer, you aren't placed in the position where employer-subsidized coverage is the only type you can afford. You can also choose the extent of insurance once you've gone above the state minimum. There are factors in your lifestyle that can lower your payments, because they lower your risk. As a result, our auto insurance payment is one-fifth of our health insurance payment, and that's after the company has paid its part.

Though pet health insurance is available, it isn't mandatory or common. Veterinary medicine simply cost what it cost, and you pay at time of service. You can choose your veterinarian. As a result, most families that own a pet are capable of affording that pet. Veterinarians do not charge $100 for a band-aid. They know that the families involved will be paying the entire bill, and if their care is too expensive, their customers will go elsewhere. What about people who really can't pay for their pet's care? Organizations abound to help them. I had my cats spayed when I was a college student with a part-time job, and I had it done at a mobile unit for less than half the price of an office visit. The care was just as good.

You may notice that neither of my examples involve increased government regulation, intervention, or spending.

Obama's motivation?

2009-05-25T06:51:00.003-04:00

Many of my posts here are influenced by various forum discussions on political happenings. Most of them are ideas that I have fleshed out while taking my morning shower. This morning, though, I sat down and wrote an entire post, first draft, straight from my head, while giving my baby her breakfast after a record eight hour stretch of sleep! Upon re-reading it, I thought it was worth simply posting in its entirety.

The discussion started with the new credit card rules and soon moved to things that the administration has been doing that have raised or will raise prices on the average person, thanks to taxes, inflation, and/or changed business practices. One person doubted my take on the situation and basically suggested that I believed everything was Obama's fault because he and the "Demon-crats" had an agenda to bring the American traveler (the last subject was a Democrat-floated proposal to use tax to keep the gas price at $4) to his knees, because that "makes SO much sense *eyeroll smiley*". This was my response:

No, it doesn't, because that's not his plan. It's hard to say exactly what his plan is, but I think I've got the gist of it...it springs from a genuine desire to 'set things right' for the people he believes have been disenfranchised by capitalism.

I don't know if he personally endorses the $4/gallon plan. It springs, however, from a belief that Americans use "too much oil", thereby ruining the environment, and the only way to keep them from doing it is to raise the price until they start cutting back of their own accord. The idea itself follows logically... it just doesn't start with reality. The reality is that though a swatch of middle-class Americans may be able to slim out a small percentage of their driving, the working poor have already gotten it as far down as they can and now have to cut down on food and medical care, and the rich have enough money to continue paying for the increased prices and won't be affected much.

His actual ideas, as well, follow logically from their premise. The only problem is that the premise is not grounded in reality. The car fiasco springs from a belief that hybrids are utterly affordable and easily makeable and the only reason why they aren't all over the place is because the auto companies want bigger profits and the oil companies have it in for us. The truth is that hybrids are losses. They're significantly more expensive as new cars. you can't find them as used cars, and they STILL present a loss between manufacturing costs and selling price.

Obama and most of the Democratic majority are not businessmen, and they're not working poor families, and they're not farmers. They don't understand how you can make more without taking it away from someone else, something any six-year-old with a (supervised) vegetable garden learns by August. They don't realize that you can't make something happen just by saying it'll happen, because they've been steeped in the notion of "positive thinking" (which has its uses, but ordering the sun to shine isn't one of them). They've all gone to these huge famous colleges where the ivory tower notion of the way the world works is passed around and around and around like a cow chewing its cud, and then they have lived lives of privilege (compared to most of the rest of us) surrounded by people who have merely reinforced their beliefs.

This, by the way, is why the percentage of people who approve of Obama as a person, the much-quoted 55-60% depending on which day it is, is much higher (twice as high, last I heard) than the percentage of people who approve of his policies. Lots of people like his charisma, but polls keep showing that Americans don't want the government running banks and companies and such and Obama and his crowd just keep doing it, because they believe they can do a better job. And they can't, because their beliefs are based on a perceived notion of justice and injustice and equality and discrimination, instead of the kind of understanding about profit and loss that any business major already has.

But they won't hear it from businessmen, because they believe that businessmen are all collective Scrooges strip-mining the populace because they like to see people suffer as long as it makes them money money money hahahahaha, like any Saturday Morning villain from the '80's and '90's... at least, the ones whose goals weren't destroying the environment Just Because.

Giving back to whom?

2009-05-18T17:39:00.003-04:00

President Obama said something in his speech at Notre Dame that caught my attention. Actually, he said many things that caught my attention, but there is one that I want to focus on here. I knew that there was something wrong with his statement, but I did not realize what it was until I started reading today's transcript from the talk show host Rush Limbaugh. I'll be using quotes from both Obama and Limbaugh before taking the discussion in a slightly different direction. Obama was trying to speak as a Christian. Limbaugh was trying to speak as a Conservative. I will be considering this from the perspective of a Christian Conservative. Let's start with Obama.

Too many of us view life only through the lens of immediate self-interest and crass materialism; in which the world is necessarily a zero-sum game. The strong too often dominate the weak, and too many of those with wealth and with power find all manner of justification for their own privilege in the face of poverty and injustice.

Of course, Obama has a fix for this. He spoke of it during another speech, this one at Arizona State:

With a degree from this university, you have everything you need to get started. Did you study business? Why not help our struggling non-profits find better, more effective ways to serve folks in need. Nursing? Understaffed clinics and hospitals across this country are desperate for your help. Education? Teach in a high-need school; give a chance to kids we can't afford to give up on - prepare them to compete for any job anywhere in the world. Engineering? Help us lead a green revolution, developing new sources of clean energy that will power our economy and preserve our planet....one thing I know about a body of work is that it's never finished. It's cumulative; it deepens and expands with each day that you give your best, and give back, and contribute to the life of this nation.

Part of this is not news... he's been mistaking personal charity for nationalism for a while now. Nowadays what's important isn't helping people, it's contributing to the nation. This is, of course, the point at which patriotism becomes fascism.
Now Rush Limbaugh responded to the phrase on his radio program today, and brought up a very interesting point:

And then he was telling them, "Give back, give back," all these college graduates. Give back what? They've got nothing to give back. They haven't acquired anything yet! The things they do have, have been given to them, everything -- by their overindulgent Baby Boomer mommies and daddies. Now when they can go out and earn money so they can repay what they've been given, Obama is trying to tell 'em, "Don't do that! Don't give back. Go back and 'give back' by working at a nonprofit or some such thing." It's convoluted.

I hate this whole concept of "giving back" anyway, that somehow it is the duty of the successful to "give back." Walter Williams, an occasional guest host on this program, has it exactly right on this whole notion of "giving back." The only people need to give anything back are the thieves among us: the thieves and the criminals, the people who have taken things which are not theirs. They're the ones that need to give back... But this notion of giving back is so convoluted because Obama is talking to a bunch of college graduates who don't have anything yet and telling them to give back.

This whole notion of giving something back is rooted in the belief whatever you have is somehow ill-gotten. That you've cheated, lied, or stolen to get it or that you're somehow not entitled to it, and so you need to give back.

Now for a different perspective.

Obama is not telling people to do something wrong. It isn't a terrible thing to work for a non-profit. It's true that the country could benefit from more people being engaged in charitable work. Also, Rush is not off-base. To give, you need to have something to give. Some people choose to acquire and give money. Some give their time. Those who give their money support those who give their time. When's the last time you heard a missionary speak at your church? What's the first thing a new missionary needs if he's ever going to make it to the field? Funding. However, this is getting off my intended subject, so let me actually begin to make my point.

The problem with Obama's bent is that he is motivating by guilt. He would have you believe that being well-off is intrinsically evil, and trying to work at a well-paying position is nothing but rank selfishness. He also would have you believe that the rich only become rich at the expense of the poor, and there is no other way to do it except to not be rich. I've spoken on this before.

But the Bible does not motivate charitable giving by guilt. The story of Ananias and Sapphira proves that, when they are told that while they still owned the land, it was their own, and when they sold it, the money was under their control. In the Gospels, we learn that God loves a cheerful giver. Obama is trying to produce the fearful giver.

God wants us to give because we have charitable feelings towards our fellow man, because we care about others, and out of gladness for what God has provided for us. Obama is telling us to give because we owe our fellow man for the simple fact that we succeeded and they did not. (Of course, the definition of success is rapidly shrinking. At first it was $250K/year, then $200K/year, then $120K/year, and now it seems that merely having a college degree puts you in the crosshairs, even if you are not yet employed.) Obama is not approaching this from a Christian viewpoint, no matter what he claims. He is approaching this from a very authoritarian socialist viewpoint.

In the authoritarian socialist government, the State craves control. It cannot bear to rely on people's goodwill, which is why it seeks to control us through fear and coercion. The tax increases Obama is planning is the coercion, and his speeches to these colleges is the fear. He, like most or all liberal Democrats, do not believe that enough people will give to others unless they are giving back... unless they are paying a debt that they know will be collected upon one way or the other. Remember the death threats made against the AIG executives.

I actually have a way to describe the State craving for control. With my first baby, I had to bottle-feed. I got used to it pretty quickly and had him on a schedule. At x time, he got x ounces of milk. Now, for my second, I am able to successfully breastfeed. Breastfeeding is not like bottle feeding. It is a co-operation between the mother and the infant, a matter of supply and demand. It does not run on a schedule. She lets me know when she is hungry, which could be anywhere from one to five hours since her last feeding. There is no gauge, no ounce markers, and I have no way of knowing how much she has had when she refuses the breast and decides that she is done. The only way I can measure my success is when she is weighed at the doctor's office. Then I find out that, despite my fears that she isn't getting half what I would have given her on a bottle, she is actually gaining so well that the doctor is surprised that she is only on breastmilk. Now if I gave into my fear and switched to bottle-feeding, she would be deprived of a wide variety of benefits so well known by now that they no longer need to be proven, and that for no good reason, because breastfeeding is working perfectly well.

The authoritarian socialist government has the same sort of fear. It wants to know how much money is going into charity, and where it is going. It wants to be sure that everyone is "doing their fair share". It is not content with trusting a people who are so generous that, though our government's charitable contributions put us near the bottom of the list of contributors, the private outpouring put us clearly at the top. Obama will not be content with "measuring success by weight gained", in this case merely checking to see if there are fewer poor and/or they are better off than before. No, he must have full control over the very process, even if it is not the best and healthiest way for society to operate.

The Christian Conservative does not scoff at charity, nor does he believe that people can only be poor because they do not deserve help. He sees helping the poor as his blessed duty, blessed because he is capable of doing so, a duty because God's love motivates him to help. However, he must watch out for the liberal rhetoric, and understand that charity should not be coerced; nor must it be motivated by fear and coercion.

Personal News: Update

2009-05-07T10:17:00.002-04:00

For those of you who only read this blog and have been wondering, I had my baby on April 2nd. She had the cord around her neck, probably as a result of the version, but the capable doctor and midwife untangled her right away and she started breathing on her own.

She's perfectly healthy, 8lbs 13oz at birth, and already sleeping a 5-6hr stretch during the night. I'm still technically in post-partum recovery and doing alright. Of course I think she's the prettiest baby ever!

So in the midst of diapers, nursing, and juggling the schedules of homemaker, mother-of-infant, and homeschooling mother... I return to my blog.

Shattered Dreams

2009-05-07T10:01:00.002-04:00

Have you ever hung out with friends or coworkers and started talking about what you would do if you were rich? Usually the conversation starts the same way. "Man, if I won the lottery, I would..."

Stop. Full stop.

If you win the lottery, your winnings are taxed. If you win big, you will be taxed big. Obama is planning on putting a heavy tax on earnings over $250K. Of course, that $250K will be taxed too, at varying rates from the first dollar to the last, so you won't even net $250K. But he's decided that's as much as any reasonable person should ever make in a year, even though you'd hoped that lottery winning meant that you'd never have to work again.

You'd be better off to not buy a lottery ticket at all. The worst that could happen is that you could win, and why are you bothering to spend the ticket money? If you get lucky, it will all be taken away.

Ever been a kid in the basement with a dinky cheap guitar hoping to become the next big hit? Got your friends together, the level-headed bassman, the over-excited lead singer, the wacky drummer? You might want to rethink your plans. You're a musician, not a business. If you make it big, you'll make lots of money. If you make lots of money, Obama will take it away from you. You'd be better off just getting some midrange job and not trying to 'make it big' at all.

Same thing goes if you're a budding inventor, composer, actor... want to make it big? Watch out. You might make it big enough to attract the government's attention. All the risk you took, sleeping in your car, failure after mind-numbing failure, all the years you spent honing your art, all the college debt you accrued trying to stick out from the rest, all gone. Obama and the Democrats have decided that anyone who puts in the work and risk to make it big is destined to hand their money over to people who took neither the work nor the risk simply to make it at all.

What about small businesses? My brother, a tax accountant, clued me into this one. The common designation for a small business is an "S corporation", due to its risks and advantages. Unfortunately, "S corporations" require you to report your business earnings as income, and you do so before you start paying your employees or rent. So if you make a business income of $300K and have expenses of $250K, guess what? You're going under.

From reading what proponents of socialism have to say, I can only guess that they believe that if you take away the incentive to excel, to 'make it big', to win, that people will continue to try. They seem to believe that people will still reach for the prize, even when there is no prize to reach. Capitalism and the free market believe that they are wrong. History is on the side of capitalism and the free market in this case.

What will happen to this country when nobody bothers to risk becoming The Next Big? When inventors no longer fiddle in their garages, and teenagers no longer form impromptu bands in their basements? When nobody buys lottery tickets for fear they might win? When doctors and surgeons do as some are already planning and quit working halfway through the year to avoid making 'too much money', reducing their numbers and making it very hard to get an appointment in October?

What will become of us then?

Personal news!

2009-03-16T21:18:00.000-04:00

I don't usually post news about myself on this blog. I usually reserve it for my political and religious rants. Still, I thought I might give my few readers an idea of what's going on with me, as well as a good reason why I haven't said much here lately.

As some of you might know, I am pregnant and due April 4th, though the baby might come earlier or later, as babies generally do. I have the feeling it'll be by the end of March, as she's been dropping a little over the past few days. Yes, the baby is a girl.

At my 35 week appointment she turned out to still be breech. The doctor had some concern, but not a great deal, as she still had room to turn around. When she was still breech at 36 weeks, though, he gave me my options. I could wait and see if she was going to turn. If she turned, all would be normal, but if she remained breech, I would have to have an emergency Cesarean. I could, if I chose, simply schedule a Cesarean right then and there. His third option, though, perked my interest. He proposed we simply turn the baby.

The ECV, or External Cephalic Version, used to be a common way of trying to deal with breech babies, especially before c-sections became safer than a breech delivery for the baby. Recently, as the U.S. and Britain have tried to cut down on their prominent (many other civilized countries say 'excessive') use of the c-section, the procedure has been coming back into vogue. My doctor tends to be on the leading edge of any and all technologies that reduce or eliminate the need of heavy medical intervention.

So I agreed to the procedure, and it was done last week. At the hospital, under careful monitoring, he rhythmically pressed and rubbed on my belly to coax the baby (without forcing her) to do a 180. It's done at a hospital because there is a 1% chance that the procedure will break your water and force you into labor. Luckily, my doctor is very good at his work. When she didn't turn, he had my bed tipped backwards with my feet in the air and tried again. This time she went for it. He told me that the way I was shaped and the way she was lying, she probably didn't have the room to turn her own self, which was good news. It meant she probably couldn't turn back.

Today I went for a fetal monitoring appointment. Now that this ECV has been done, they want to monitor her weekly just to make sure everything's alright. There is always the possibility that turning the baby has bent or crimped the umbilical cord or damaged the placenta somehow, and that would show up as distress in the baby's heartbeat. She has been verified as of today's appointment to be entirely healthy, and a short ultrasound confirmed that she not only has not turned back to breech, but is dropping into head-down position and can't go back now.

So some time in the next few days, weeks, or possibly up to one month (but not beyond), I am going to go into labor, go to the hospital, and have this baby. Thanks to my doctor's wisdom (and my own willingness to go along with something that hurt nearly as much as labor), it should be a regular, low-risk birth. Needless to say, that will result in another long period in which I will not be writing on political or religious matters. Until then, you might still hear from me! But if you don't, I have the feeling you will no longer be wondering why.

Hope and Change!

2009-02-28T09:45:00.004-05:00

Alright, it's been a couple of months and we've got a fuller and richer idea of what Obama means by 'hope' and 'change'. Let's take a look at what's being said, what's been said, and what is being planned for the future.

President Obama, being eternally optimistic and having run on a platform that claimed sunshine and bluebirds every day should he be elected, has been speaking doom and gloom on the economy so often that even Bill Clinton has reprimanded him on the topic. The stock market has dropped further since his election than it did in all the time W. Bush was in office, and every time he makes a speech, it takes a fall of a couple hundred points. His message is simple; the only way for this country to survive is to give him every power, and to oppose any of his decisions is to want this country to fail. As well, to want lower taxes and greater freedom is now unpatriotic.

Our 'stimulus package' was put together under the watchful eye of Nancy Pelosi, who encourages government funding of contraception and abortion services under the unapologetic (her words!) claim that we can cut government spending on education and healthcare for children by reducing the number of children. I would never have thought of that solution. My natural preference is to reduce or eliminate government spending by cutting taxpayer programs for children of rich families, but the expansion to SCHIP either has been or will be passed soon.

The changes in the package made to medical spending were put into place by Tom Daschle, who has praised Europeans above Americans for being willing to accept a 'hopeless diagnosis' for a treatable condition on the grounds that it would cost the government too much money to help you.

Robert Reich, another lawmaker who worked on the package, caused a minor stir when he pronounced that guidelines should be created for the infrastructure upgrades to ensure that construction jobs created by the work do not go to skilled construction workers or white men. We must ensure that "women and minorities" who are not construction workers or skilled professionals are the ones who ensure that our bridges are safe to cross.

But don't despair! You'll be getting tax relief, if you don't make what the government deems to be too much money, which is about $75K/year. Yeah, I know Obama said his threshhold was $250K, but then Biden, I think it was, said $150K, and someone else said $120K, so are you really surprised? Anyways, if you are not rich, i.e. making $75K/year, you'll be getting about $25/month back in your paycheck starting in April. Don't you feel lucky? It's a tax credit, not a cut, but it's evenly distributed so that it looks like a cut. Oh yes, and you will get this money even if you don't pay any taxes at all, so it isn't really a 'tax' adjustment so much as a welfare check. Basically, the government is using the IRS to send welfare checks to people who are already working, whether they want it or not, and anyone making over $75K/year, in other words, the rich, will be paying for it.

This is the Democrat definition of hope, you see. The government will be handling the redistribution of wealth. If they decide that you make 'too much' money, you will be forced to pay for the lifestyles of all the people who don't. However, even if this level of financial burden bankrupts you, it will still not be enough. Therefore, all the 'little people' who don't make 'too much' money have to learn to be content with what the government provides. Instead of negotiating your own prices with an HMO in order to obtain the medical care that you need, you must expect that if you are too expensive for the government, you will not be allowed to obtain care. You must learn to accept that which has been rationed out to you instead of seeking your own fortune.

The government will care for all your needs, and if your needs are too many, the government will see to it that the population of the needy is reduced through abortion and lack of care for the ill and elderly until the finances work. In other words, prevent hunger by killing the hungry and prevent poverty by killing the poor. The survivors will revere you for saving them from want.

Ah, let me take a moment and address the jobs situation. The rise in unemployment is actually less of an all-over set of layoffs and more targeted to a couple of specific industries, primarily construction. But don't despair, you who are losing your construction jobs! The benevolent Obama has foreseen your needs! He and the Democrats in Congress are setting up a large spending spree on upgrading roads, bridges, and highways.

Unfortunately, Reich and others advocate restrictions on this spending to ensure that the money does not go to actual construction workers and/or 'skilled professionals', especially if they are white men. That's right, despite the fact that 'whites' make up about two-thirds of this nation's population, we must make sure that they are not getting any government funding, even if that means that we cannot hire the people who actually lost their jobs in this recent rise in unemployment. Don't despair, however. Plenty of money in the stimulus package will go towards hiring biologists to study field mice and climatologists to study 'global warming', even though there is no indication of a high unemployment level among biologists or climatologists.

How will Obama pay for all these non-white non-construction workers, biologists, and climatologists? Well, next up on the agenda is supposedly a 25% cut in defense spending. That's right, since the housing market collapse has caused many lost jobs among various construction workers and associated professionals, we must pay for non-professionals and people who are not construction workers by taking money away from the people who employ carpenters, painters, plumbers, electricians, and welders. With the government refusing to buy military equipment built by blue-collar workers and then refusing to hire those same blue-collar workers with the money they've taken away, I'm afraid we're in for a lot more government-subsidized people lining up for their rationed food and rationed healthcare.

Is this hope? Well, it certainly is change.

Fixing the economy is too expensive, but socialism never has too great a price?

2009-02-07T12:09:00.003-05:00

Charles Schumer is an idiot.

You won't often hear me calling people idiots. I tend to not like doing that. I don't call people idiots just for disagreeing with me. You have to have come out with "a real doozy" for that word to apply.

The Democrats killed (by vote) the Republican alternative to Obama's economic plan. They claimed that the package of mostly tax cuts, including cutting the bottom personal tax brackets, was just too expensive. This comes from the same people whose only hesitation on the collection of pork termed a "stimulus package" is that they 'fear' it may not spend enough money.

The real beauty, however, comes from Schumer's objection to the Republican plan to encourage banks to offer fixed-rate mortgage loans at 4-4.5% with 'jumbo loans' being exempt. This would help an awful lot of people, by the way, especially the minorities that the Democrats claim to favor. Think about it... the Democrats encourage minority home ownership by letting banks offer a $300,000 loan at variable interest rates, for a house that was worth less than $200K just a few years ago. The Republicans encourage minority home ownership by floating a suggestion to encourage banks to lend to them at a 4-4.5% fixed rate. But anyways, back to Schumer's objection.

The plan would provide a windfall to banks charging fees to refinance mortgages.

That's right, that's his objection. Those naughty banks might actually make some profit off the mortgage refinancing fee. We're talking roughly in the neighborhood of $3,000 for the privilege of refinancing a loan. What will that do to the poor consumer? Well, I recently refinanced at a lower interest rate and rolled the cost into the loan, and still saved over $300/month in bill payments. But that's besides the point, really.

Banks might make money by refinancing mortgages. That's the objection.

Remember TARP? It was meant to hand banks some capital in hopes of restoring liquidity. Basically, the government handed them money in hopes that they would start lending again. Guess what the banks didn't do with the money. That's right. This plan got through a Democrat-controlled Congress with ease.

So basically, it's A-Ok for the government to give the banks 'free' money in hopes that they'll start lending again, but it's unacceptable for the government to prod banks into earning some money by starting to lend again.

This isn't about the economy! This is about government control of the private sector! The Democrats aren't after an end to the recession. They want to turn this country to socialism. They're just using the recession as an excuse!

Who will save you more money?

2009-02-03T10:15:00.001-05:00

Alright, folks, here's the deal. Obama wants to give working singles $500, whether they pay that much in taxes or not. He wants to give working couples $1,000, whether they pay that much in taxes or not.

The Republicans want to cut the 10% tax bracket (first $8,350 for singles, first $16,700 for couples) to 5% and the 15% tax bracket (to $33,950 for singles or $67,900 for couples) to 10%.

What does this mean for your family?

Well, let's take a family of four making $50K/year. In the state of Connecticut, that's low enough to qualify for several government programs, including fuel assistance and state-funded healthcare. Doing the calculations for taxes in the first and second bracket, I come up with a savings of $2500 under the Republican plan and.. $1000 under the Obama plan.

So let's try someone else. A single person working full-time at federal minimum wage. That's roughly $13,624/year. Apply the tax brackets and he saves about $681 under the Republican plan. Under Obama's plan, he gets handed a check for $500.

Now I know taxes are a wee bit more complicated than that... things like healthcare expenditures, mortgage interest, and such can change the amount of money that you actually pay taxes on. Still, a little math can tell you the truth... you have to be making pretty darn near nothing to benefit from Obama's plan over the Republicans' plan!

So which plan do the actual workers of this country want?
Feel free to pass this on!

Lack of Hatred

2009-01-26T08:27:00.004-05:00

I can't believe it took me this long to realize this. I must be going senile. Perhaps I can blame this 'failing' on my pregnancy. Then again, as I haven't specifically seen anyone else writing about it, perhaps we have all simply fallen into a certain level of taking things for granted.

This morning I was getting ready for the day while talking to my husband, who was also getting ready for his day, and it occurred to me to wonder about the community response to President Obama rescinding the Mexico City Policy. This policy, for those of you either hiding under a rock or not involved in the abortion debate, prevented the U.S. from funding abortions overseas. This is a definite blow for those on the pro-life side, and so controversial among many Christian and/or conservative groups that he even signed it secretly and off-camera.

So I sat down to chat with a friend of mine. "Hey, you hear more from the mainstream media than I do," I typed. "Over this past week, have there been an upswing of stories about pro-life violence against pro-choice groups/people/abortion clinics/abortion doctors? White powder sent to clinics, people trying to enter a clinic being knocked down and beaten, things like that?"

"Not that I've heard of," he answered.

I told him that it was interesting, but also what I'd expected to hear. He wanted to know why, and I pointed out that the Mexico City Policy had been rescinded a few days ago. "So?" he responded.

"That's the second interesting thing I noticed," I typed.

See, when the gay activists don't get their way, they go on a rampage. They threaten, they cause violence, and they not only boycott places, but they prevent other patrons from entering. Interestingly, nobody's surprised when they react this way, and I have heard more than once the phrase "I can understand their anger." However, when pro-lifers don't get their way, nobody goes on a rampage, and nobody is surprised.

The same thing happens when Christians are marginalized in the media. When Muslims are marginalized, the protests invariably start. Places are set on fire, people are injured or killed, guns fired, knives used... it's not a pretty picture. Parts of Europe refuse to even criticize Islam anymore for fear of seeing death and destruction. However, people are allowed to speak downright blasphemously about Christianity without fear, because Christians do not respond with violence, and nobody wonders why.

In many cases, groups that used to claim their way as the peaceful solution are bullying their way into society merely by making people afraid of the violence that they'll visit upon us if they are not given their way. Meanwhile, the groups marginalized in society as mean and violent and evil are simply remaining civil... and what's more, nobody's surprised by it!

Obama wants us to be Boxer

2009-01-21T10:15:00.003-05:00

Obama's inauguration speech was very interesting. At first, it appeared to travel in two different directions, conservative and liberal. It took me several hours and the memory of a quite memorable animated version of Orwell's Animal Farm to realize that he was, in fact, driving in the same direction the entire time.

Conservatives value and wish to reward hard work and responsibility. On the surface, Obama appears to agree with them. Watch for the reasons he gives to work hard, however, and who he hopes will benefit! That is where you will find the difference between the conservative and Boxer.

Who is Boxer? Boxer is the Animal Farm version of the working class, a draft horse who puts his all into his duties, doing everything he can. Uncomplaining, he does not take advantage of the perks of socialism, like the pigs do. His loyalty never wavers, and he trusts his new leaders even when their planned retirement for him is not a good rest, but the knacker's wagon. (In other words, for those of you who don't read British books regularly, the butcher.)

Let's take a look at Obama's speech. We already know the parts in which he mentions the importance of hard work, responsibility, and tough choices. Let us now examine for what or whom we are to sacrifice:

But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

And earlier:

To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect.

When speaking of the military, what does he praise?

We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves.

Yes, after years of trying to feed us falsehood-by-simplification, claiming that the extremism of liberalism is socialism and the extremism of conservatism is fascism, we now have someone telling us that the reason why we must work hard and be responsible is to benefit the Nation first and the entire world second. He is now able to spout fascism, and it is likely that few people will take this for what it is, because we've had repeated to us over and over that only Right-Wingers can be fascists.

That isn't to say that socialism was not a theme in his speech, however. Consider his goal for government:

We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.

And again, you notice government's role in the everyday lives of its citizens:

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.

Lest you continue to question whether or not he is truly speaking of conservative responsibility or a new era of socialism, I point you towards his own websites detailing his own plans for America. Would you hear it only in his speech, and nowhere else? Try this piece:

Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control — and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart — not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.

Though many will try to tell you that his speech is a mixture of conservativism and liberalism, in actual fact his speech is a mixture of facism and socialism. We are to be hard-working and responsible to support the government, and the government is to provide for us. But how can he believe that this will work? It failed on Plymouth Rock. It failed in Russia. It failed in Italy. It is failing in China. Everywhere this has been tried, it has failed. He actually anticipates that question and answers it, also in his speech:

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.

That's right, he is speaking fascism and socialism, and he knows it. He cannot deny it, only attempt to cloak it and confuse the issue. But in the end, he is doing two things: he is asking us all to be Boxer, and he is claiming that This Time It Will Work.

Focusing on the wrong end

2009-01-15T09:36:00.002-05:00

I keep hearing it from the Republican so-called leadership who are hijacking the party into moderate materialism... "We need to focus on the financial conservatism and jettison the social conservatives... so that we can reach more people." They have their tactic completely and totally backwards. If anything, we need to do completely the opposite. I'd go so far as to say that if I had to choose between social or financial conservatism, I would choose social.

Did anybody reading this also read George Orwell's Animal Farm? I recommend it. Right now I am thinking of a specific character in the story, a pig named Snowflake. In the story, the farmer is chased from the farm and the pigs set up a socialist government that turns brutally totalitarian by the end. Snowflake, chased off and killed eventually by the power-seizing Napoleon, is a 'gentler dictator' and genuinely works towards the good of the other animals. He may be an economic liberal, but he acts as a social conservative, and does not seem to govern his own life by the mantra that you do what you can to secure your own power and satisfy your own pleasure. He is not a moral relativist.

I will never truly believe that socialism is the best way for a country to operate, but I would rather have a good dictator than a society left adrift and manipulated by evil men. Even government-mandated programs for the poor is better than a set of undisciplined rich men who sneer at and oppress those beneath their income levels. Indeed, in a morally-corrupt culture, a firmer hand is needed. Liberty is for adults, not children.

If we truly work for the good of our society, we must focus on morality, even above freedom. If our sons and daughters are not raised in such a way as to be willing to give up power voluntarily, what will it matter when we send them into public office with their heads full of capitalism? We will end up with tyranny of a different sort.

Those who prize economic conservatism above social conservatism will create a land so undisciplined and brutal that socialism will be needed eventually just to hold man's passions in check. Those who prize social conservatism will create a land in which government power holds no fear for the citizens and can be lowered over time by those who have not grown to love power.

We are headed for a time of increases socialism under Obama, but we can still train ourselves and teach our children to be people of moral standing, who not only understand, but feel that lying, cheating, and stealing is plainly wrong. That is the only way we will continue to be worthy of the economic conservatism we so badly want back!

The path to bankruptcy

2009-01-04T13:36:00.003-05:00

I bet most people who read this have heard all about the big automakers crying for bailouts from the U.S. government. I bet a lot of you have read about the reasons for many their troubles. Just in case, let me summarize a big one for you here:

Although workers in companies like Toyota actually earn a higher salary on average, the worker cost to the company is nearly half that of the Big Three. People have been claiming that the Big Three pay out $75/hr per worker rather than $35-40/hr like the others do. Now, Factcheck has claimed that number is false, but even in their explanation, they acknowledge it's importance. The $75/hour is not valid for any single Joe you might point out in their company. However, when you tally up all the workers, all the retirees, and all the unemployed of the business, and divide the costs among only those who are actually working for their salary, $75/hr per worker is what you get.

Generous union contracts include, among other things, 100% salary in retirement for life, company health insurance for retirees for life, and full 100% salary for the unemployed in the business while allowing those unemployed to refuse new positions that have opened up within the company meanwhile. How many of those unemployed do you think have snapped up the first position that opened up for them? As noted above, the other automakers pay their working people more, but the companies in trouble are paying huge numbers of people to do absolutely nothing.

Now, apparently, Obama has decided that this is the best way for the U.S. government to operate. From Reuters:

Proposals included extending unemployment compensation to part-time workers, subsidizing employers who must continue health insurance benefits temporarily for laid-off and retired employees and allowing workers who lose jobs that did not include insurance to apply for Medicaid, the Times said. ...Citing Obama advisers, the newspaper said the package, which could face resistance from Republicans and conservative Democrats, would cost at least $775 billion.
"This has really forced people to think outside the box," the Times quoted a House Appropriations Committee aide as saying, "because this is more money than anybody expected to be spending."[emphases mine]

Yes, you've heard it right. Paying heavily for people who aren't working has been crippling our auto manufacturers, so why not do it in the government, too? Why on earth would Obama do something like this during an economic crisis when we've got such recent evidence of it's total failure to maintain a cost-effective company?

Well, to understand that, you've got to remember what his goal is, what the Liberal goal is, being entirely antithetical to the Conservative goal. His goal is to promote dependence on the government. What matters to the liberals is not that this course of action sunk the Big Automakers. What matters to them is that it brought the Big Automakers to the Big Government looking for help. That's the goal.

So in that sense, the failure of the automakers signals success for Obama's goals rather than failure. It worked with the automakers. Will it work with the rest of us? It looks like he wants to find out.

The most dangerous word in politics

2009-01-02T13:57:00.003-05:00

There's a word I would like to strike from political language today and for the rest of this year. Unfortunately, with Obama's presidency, I suspect this word will only gain strength and importance far beyond it's merit. This single word is what's wrong with our political system, our economic system, and our societal morality. The word is entitlement.

We are, in fact, entitled to nothing. We are born naked, and survive though the love and instinct of fellow men and women. We take nothing when we die. Pure nature scoffs at entitlement. Not even predators have a right to long life, much less the prey. If we live from the prey and avoid or kill the predators, still nothing we can gather is utterly safe from disastrous storms. A volcanic eruption or an earthquake can level the proudest building in seconds, leaving us, yet again, with nothing. Natural law promises... nothing.

All that we have is what we are allowed to have, what we are given, by God. The main overreaching reason why God gives us things is because of His overwhelming love for us. We are not entitled to it. God owes us nothing. We do not deserve anything God gives us. We can't even keep up our end of the easiest bargain, the lightest burden. Despite this, God has chosen to bind Himself with promises toward our greater good.

The increasing shift to government programs replacing charitable interests have helped to foster a spirit of entitlement among the citizens of this country. Poorer members of society who used to accept what people were willing to give them with a grateful heart now demand what they feel they deserve for no reason at all beyond having been born.

Don't get too confused here in attempts to ream me out for insensitivity. I would prefer that every single person in this world, in the spirit of human dignity and humble appreciation for God's gifts to us, found what aid was necessary in keeping themselves clothed, fed, and sheltered. We are called to generosity and charity, remembering where we would be if not for God's grace. But neither they nor we are entitled to a single thing.

Hard work is honorable and required of Christians, but even it is no absolute guarantee of success, nor a reason to demand that the world responds favorably to you. You can do everything right, and there is still no guarantee. A simple fire set by an irresponsible idiot can destroy an entire lifetime of fortune, and the flames do not care how or when you acquired it. Again, I am not decrying hard work or responsibility. I am just reminding all of us that we are not entitled to anything.

For this reason, I object to government social programs of every sort. I believe charity to be the best replacement, a process by which people are bound together with gratitude and humility, rather than being split apart by entitlement and resentment; of the rich for having their hard-earned goods forcibly taken, and of the poor for the rich not having given them everything they feel they deserve simply for existing.

Responsibility versus Entitlement

2008-12-30T19:25:00.003-05:00

I submit for your consideration the following from a Moneynews article today:

“One very troubling point is that, whether measured using 30-day or 60-day delinquencies, re-default rates increased each month and showed no signs of leveling off after six months and even eight months,” said Comptroller of the Currency John C. Dugan.

“This trend of increasing delinquencies underscores the need to understand why these modifications have not been more sustainable.”

I can explain precisely why these modifications have not helped. Many of these mortgages were initially given to people who should not have qualified for the loans. In many cases, they were also used not to allow a working-class worker to move into a small suburban starter home, but to let people who have spent their entire lives expecting the government to provide for them stretch their budget to the limit to build or buy a "McMansion" on abandoned farmland. These are not people who are genuinely struggling to put proper clothing on their children and milk in the fridge. These are people who are "struggling" to keep up with their brand new car payments, their cell phone bills, and still have enough money left over to get their manicures.

I did not watch a lot of the Obama commercial that focused in on "poor families who need help" (from the Democrats, naturally), but I saw enough to remember the woman who said that her kids drank soda because she could not afford milk. I had two immediate thoughts. One was that if her kids drank water like water instead of drinking soda like water, no doubt she could afford a little milk for them. Maybe not a lot, but a little milk and a lot of water is healthier than a lot of soda. The other thing I noticed was her finely manicured nail job, which I asked around about and discovered that $40/month was a very low estimate for upkeep on that kind of beauty product. $40/month will buy a lot of milk... easily two gallons a week. That would give four children a little over a cup of milk each day right there.

My point? These are people who are used to expecting things. They likely got given what they wanted by their parents. They grew up watching commercials that told them what they needed to want. From allowances given for doing nothing to college credit cards gone sky-high, when have they ever learned that they can't have what they "must have"? What kind of standard of living do you have, anyways, if you can't have your hair the color you want it? And if they can't afford it, that's someone else's problem.

So why should they start paying now that they have a more reasonable loan? They've just learned that if they cry enough, banks will do everything possible to accomodate them, to ensure that they aren't (horrors) turned out of their five-bedroom lake-view domiciles. If they continue to cry and don't bother to pay, no doubt in the end they can get what they want for free, especially with a political party in place who doesn't seem to understand that the government does not create wealth... it just takes wealth away from other people.

In the midst of all this nonsense, one family acquired a modest raised ranch on a fixed-rate FHA and have held onto it with all they've got, forgoing cell phones for electricity, forgoing car loans for student loans, forgoing nail jobs and hair jobs for milk and potatoes. They have never missed a payment. It's that kind of attitude, responsibility rather than entitlement, that will bring down foreclosures of modified loans.

Reconfiguration

2008-12-28T18:35:00.003-05:00

I am going to take a few days for contemplation, and then I am probably going to change the title of my blog. I am probably not going to change it's current purpose.

The current title is The Determined Homemaker, which very deeply fit my purpose when I wrote it. At the time, I had just quit my full-time job, which I had taken on very reluctantly when my husband was laid off. With hidden tears and stress levels high, I left my one-year-old son and set out to keep food on the table as a software engineer at a local defense contractor. Depending on the way I look at it, this was either a complete failure or a success.

I managed to hold out for three years while my husband fast-tracked full-time to his bachelor's degree, giving him the standing needed to make the needed salary for me to return home. On the other hand, I got very sick with several neural and intestinal problems, and it took me a good year or so to really regain my health again, and on top of that I kept getting poor performance reviews. When I'm working as a programmer, I'm a very good coder. I am not a data-entry whiz (numbers dyslexia). I'm not a manager. I can teach and tutor readily, but I have to be given a class and subject. I can't just go walking about and Know.. or Find Out.. what people need to know. In short, I was, as I often am, a square peg in a world full of round holes. If they'd expected me to build an application, they might've thought I was a genius. They wanted me to psuedo-manage data entry personnel, and I was a complete flop.

I'm still dealing with the self-esteem fallout from that fiasco.

I suppose I've spent the last year trying to prove that I'm a good enough homemaker to justify being a pretty bad Extrovert Psuedo-Manager Career Woman. The time for that is over. I don't know how I'm going to move past it, but I know I need to. Of course I'm going to keep being a full-time homemaker. But I need to stop stressing over my societal/financial worth. I've been trying to pare down my hobbies to nothing that is not highly-potentially financially profitable, so that I end up doing nothing but either homemaking or doing something that will or might land me a check, however small. That can't be my life anymore.

All these books and essays and such about finding your purpose in life seem to assume that you are supposed to pick and focus in on one single thing only that lights up your eyes, that you are drawn to naturally. What if there's more than one thing? Is it truly a waste to do something you enjoy but will never be good at? I've got some questions to answer in the coming days. It may be that my year, rather than being what I've got when I answer them, will simply be about finding the answers.

Meanwhile, I anticipate that I will continue to write religious and political essays in this blog, peppered with things I've discovered or done as a homemaker/homeschooling mom. And in time, we'll see how this blog changes as I do.

Thanks for reading!

A Christian celebrating Christmas

2008-12-16T11:07:00.003-05:00

Every year I hear the same debate, an old debate about whether or not Christians should celebrate Christmas. Personally, I know what I do, and I don't mind what others do. I see it as something that each person should be able to approach to their own conscience. The issue is not a limiting issue to me. Those who celebrate Christmas in all it's religious and secular glory, those who stick to the religious only, and those who bypass it altogether as a 'pagan festival' may all be perfectly good Christians, and I don't have a problem with any of those choices. However, I would like to address a certain argument against Christmas (and Easter) and offer my take on it.

Though there are people who have decided calmly in their own mind and conscience to avoid Christmas and Easter, there are others who end up confused by one main argument: the pagan/secular additions. If someone decides to not celebrate Christmas because he does not feel comfortable about honoring Jesus's birthday on a day that likely isn't His birthday, so much the better for him. However, sometimes their zeal in spreading their opinions leave Christians in-between, unwilling to abandon their traditions, but now viewing them with an unnecessary measure of guilt. I do not believe that God intended us to feel terrible about treating each other with charity and love because some elements of Santa Claus's history included a conglomerate of pagan beliefs. For this reason, I would like to give you something to consider as you ask yourself whether it's sinful to put candy canes on your tree or exchange gifts.

Everything that God made is inherently good. Those of you who want to talk of original sin, please hold on for a moment and give me time here. Everything God made is inherently and originally good. Anything that Satan uses has to be twisted to be made evil. Food is not sinful, but gluttony is. Sex is not sinful, but it can be misused to terrible effect.

The key here is 'originally and inherently'. Satan poisoned everything just a little bit, even us. I like the way C.S. Lewis put it in the book Screwtape Letters, in which a demon argued that God claims ownership of all under the claim that He created it, while Satan seeks to claim all under the banner of conquest. We all know that there is a spiritual war between the forces of God and Satan, and we all know the eventual outcome.

Now consider what happens during a war. One side advances, and captures an enemy fort. What do they do? If the fort is rotted, if the food is utterly poisoned, if the place is booby-trapped, they will probably raze it to the ground. However, most of the time this is not the case. The food is just as good, the fort nearly as strong, and they run up their own flag and begin to repair the fortifications.

Jesus has made it clear that we are made of good things, once enemy fortifications, now with God's flag run up and the original usefulness turned once again to good. I would submit that the same is true for Christmas. Sure, there are many people who fall into materialism and spend the holiday buying things they can't afford for people they hate, but God's flag has been run up in Christmas Cantatas. Christmas and Easter are often the only times that the non-devout attend church. That's an opportunity to run up God's flag. There is a lot of love and generosity among good people that peaks around Christmastime. When I hear of over 500 people making a commitment for Christ at the Word of Life Florida Christmas show, I see God's flag fluttering over the fortification that once involved nature goddesses and ancient superstition. I could not call that an evil thing.

So what is my advice, in the end? If the 'pagan elements' trouble you such that you prefer to not partake with a clear conscience and without the burden of guilt, by all means, do as you see best! But if you have heard over and over about the evils of this holiday, but you still love to honor God through your traditions during this time, do so without guilt! You are flying God's flag on an enemy fortification that was originally built by God.

Jesus doesn't mind you giving presents to each other on His birthday, even if you get the date wrong. Candy canes aren't going to send you to hell if they remind you (and you tell your children) of the shepherds who came to see that extraordinary baby. And whether it be turkey, ham, or steak, it's an awfully good meal, isn't it?

Energy Planning

2008-12-14T09:35:00.003-05:00

I was on a political forum and the subject turned to electricity. After hearing us shoot down the current efforts of liberals and environmentalists to give us cleaner power by forcing us to accept their methods and proposals, one person asked if we had an energy policy to offer rather than just criticisms. I happen to have one, so I wrote it out for them.

The important thing to realize is that everybody WANTS clean, inexpensive, plentiful power. The only reason why coercion has to be involved to make it work currently is because what the environmentalists keep proposing is simply currently unfeasible. (Hybrid cars, for instance, don't even have the gas economy of a simple stripped-down 15-year-old station wagon.) What we have to do is take the shackles off.

Drill drill drill! Though it would be nice if we were independent of all other countries oil-wise, it isn't really necessary. We have two reasons for drilling NOW. First, we want to get in enough oil to stop buying altogether from countries like Saudi Arabia, freeing us in matters of economic diplomacy to criticize their barbarism the same way we do places like Iraq.

Second, right now I'm seeing in the news that Iran and Russia are scaling back on military operations and buildup because the price of oil is low enough to starve out their economies. We want that. We want them in a position where they have to focus on their economy and not on making themselves big and strong. We can turn coal into oil with technology we've had since WWII and make it profitable at $35/barrel. We have the biggest coal reserves in the WORLD. That injection into the worldwide oil community would really throw prices off.

Note: I haven't said we have to fulfill ALL our oil needs ourselves. It would be nice to do if we can. But it's most important just to get us away from depending on people who "don't like us very much". It would also be nice to work the market against them, forcing them to reduce their military operations without having to fire a single shot!

Of course, there's more to it than just getting more oil out. I favor reducing our oil and coal usage by switching as much of the electrical grid as possible over to nuclear. Nuclear power is safe and effective. It's been proven by now. I think all hospitals over a certain "podunk town" size should have their own mini-nuclear generator as well. If nobody else knows how to do it, they can go ask Electric Boat, who powers submarines so safely that one sub recently crashed full speed head-on... and the mini nuclear reactor didn't even have a single problem.

Lower restrictions on vehicle manufacture. Yes, we need to know that you can survive a crash at 40mph. You don't need 50 different airbags, power windows/locks, A/C, or cruise control to do it, and all of those things weigh down a car. Actually, I would like to see enough restrictions lowered or removed for any handyman to build his own vehicle capable of passing standards and being given a license plate. You'd see plenty of fuel economy and alternate-fueled engines popping up in even greater quantity than they do now. Some of them may become commercially viable.

Save the oil for our vehicles (including airplanes) and use nuclear for our stationary electricity. Keep the prices down. That will in turn keep the prices of goods down (transportation) and the people will have more of their own money to spend.

Why is this important? Because friends and family of mine are ALREADY eying geothermal and/or solar enhancements to their house. They already want this. Why don't many of them have it? Well, right now, since the price of food went up, this household has no money to spare each month and a solar setup costs $12,000 to start.

Sure, the price isn't quite enough to offset the energy savings in money yet, but there are other reasons to want solar. For instance, in an area where winter storms knock out electricity, it's AWFULLY nice to have heat and running water in the home. None of that matters, though, if you can't afford to put the system in, and taking even more money away from the people to government-spend on doing it is not nearly as efficient as removing the artificial economic restraints that keep people from doing it themselves.

Nobody needed to be forced to adopt flat-panel TV's, DVD players, designer jeans, or Lexus's. Nobody needs to be forced to adopt personal alternate-energy systems. Just make them affordable, by lowering the cost of living and/or the cost of the product. Once the market gets out of Teh Elites and into the middle class, you won't need to pay anybody to find a way to produce a cheaper and more effective system, either! A 40" 1080p HDTV cost $3,000 a couple of years ago. This holiday season it's dropped below $1,000.

To summarize: We didn't get into cleaner and more efficient oil-burning by forcing people to limit their wood-burning usage, and we won't get into nuclear/wind/solar by forcing people to limit their oil usage. We'll do it by being prosperous enough to afford the Next Step. In the process, as an extra bonus, we may be able to turn the tables on the unfriendly countries who currently have us, as my husband so neatly puts it, 'by the short and curlies'.

The fight continues...

2008-12-11T06:50:00.002-05:00

So I've recently read that the gay activists are considering a "calling in gay" day on which they all decide to take a vacation day instead of going to work. Presumably, this will make some sort of difference someday. I personally suspect it's going to end up teaching them just how great their numbers are and how important their little faction is in this big country.

See, this idea suffers from the same kind of insipidness as the repeated plans to not buy gas on a certain day, only with likely a smaller population group. If all who label themselves 'gay' (including the virgins, which, by the way, is one method they use to make the Christian label of sin work for more than just the act to which it applies, giving an excuse to cry hatred where none exists) leave and manage to take a fair amount of their non-gay supporters with them, they just might be able to, in some local areas, have almost as much of an impact on this country and its economy as Columbus Day.

If they make it yearly and try to roust more and more people to the cause, the biggest possible effect I can see is a Christian or two getting hung on an anti-discrimination clause a few years into the future for simply showing up to work on the 'wrong day'. But let's face it... there are more and more reasons to lawfully persecute Christians in this country than there have ever been, and it's only going to get more bizarre.

As far as I'm concerned, they can go for it! It's a much healthier way to get out their frustrations than keying cars, harassing restaurant customers, sending white powder to Mormon temples, knocking down old ladies, and telling Californian blacks who venture out of their neighborhoods that they'd better just watch their backs.

In other news, a committee in New Jersey claim that civil unions might not be doing their job because sometimes participants aren't treated quite like they're legally married. Wake up, people, and get used to it! Maybe twenty years ago or so, people who were married were treated as if they were married. Nowadays, however, many stores will not even link our savings cards so that my husband's milk purchases count towards our free sixth gallon. The person who opens an account owns it, and it's increasingly difficult for me to conduct any kind of business with a company if the account is in my husband's name (and vice versa), even for ridiculous things like electricity or telephone going to the same house!

When I was working full-time, whenever my husband showed up to bring me the lunch I'd forgotten or the medication I needed, I had to give him my name, department, phone number, and card ID ahead of time or they wouldn't even tell him that I worked there. He could have showed up with the original copy of our marriage certificate to no avail. Was this a security procedure due to the nature of my work? Actually, no. It was only put into place to deal with abusive spouses. He wasn't allowed to pick up my paycheck, either, but it could get mailed straight to the house we both live in!

It takes twice as long to fill in any application or registration for hospitals or doctor's offices nowadays, because the forms do NOT assume in any way that being married means that you live in the same house, have the same telephone number, go by the same last name, or even want your spouse notified in case of an emergency. Add a kid as the product of your marriage and it gets even longer!

This society is proceeding slowly towards that in countries like Holland, where anybody can marry and almost nobody ever bothers to do so. "It doesn't really mean anything anymore," I've heard from residents when trying to find out why. The sad thing is that the people pushing hardest for this change are the gay activists, who want gay marriage to, in the end, be nothing more than a reason to shut up any voice within society that suggests that there's any religion that does not approve of their actions. Too bad for the five or ten gay couples in the U.S. (and the 97% or so heterosexuals, with 70% of them claiming the Christian religion) who were actually hoping to get something more meaningful out of it than a piece of jewelry and a bunch of words.

An understanding of Conservatism

2008-12-06T08:06:00.003-05:00

For those of you who don't know, I don't often use this blog to simply copy and paste other people's words, because I have another one for that purpose. On http://gothelittle.livejournal.com/ I collate a few of the most interesting articles I read for the day and simply paste the link and a part of the article to show why I found it interesting. I don't do it daily, but I do pretty close to that. This is the blog where I'm supposed to express my own thoughts. (Contrary to what some of the LJ commenters seem to think, I don't fully agree with all of each article I paste.)

However, this section seems to belong here, on this blog rather than my LJ blog. How did I decide that? Well, they're my blogs, and I just went with my instincts.
*****************
Reagan roots is not anti-Communism and low taxes and the Laffer Curve and all the other things that Reagan was dealing with at the time. Reagan roots are the roots of our founding. And the primary leg on that stool is individual liberty. This is a nation founded on the concept that we are individuals. We are not a collective. We are individuals. And that we do our best when we are working in our own self interest, not selfishness, but our own self interest, improving our lives, our families' lives; improves everybody's lives around ours in our communities, cities, towns, the nation at large. Individual liberty will never go out of style because as our founders correctly noted, it is part of our creation. It's what sets this country apart from every other collection of human beings in the history of the world. We have acknowledged that our creation comes from God, not from government, that our freedom is a natural yearning of our creation. And that is the natural yearning of our spirit, to be free, all humanity, all human beings. And as such, liberty will never go out of style. Freedom will never go out of style. We will never, ever say hopefully "the era of freedom is over." We will never say "the era of liberty is over." And as such, we will make a huge mistake if we fall in line with these dummkopfs, who think they're the smartest in our room, who say "the era of Reagan is over." Because the era of Reagan is basic Conservatism 101 which believes, what? The best in everybody. It does not look across a room of people with contempt. It does not look and see incompetence. It doesn't see black, white, male, female, gay, straight. It sees human beings.

Conservatism sees Americans, sees potential, sees great opportunity, sees an opportunity for people to be the best they can be using whatever ambition and desire they have. Reaganism conservatism does not need to be adapted to issues of the day. There's no such thing as the conservative version of Big Government. - Rush Limbaugh, at the Hillsdale College Churchhill Dinner

Blueprint for Societal Change

2008-11-28T07:35:00.003-05:00

In the wake of the post-election mess in California, I'd like to introduce you to a different kind of group, a different kind of lobbying, and a nonviolent means of advancing your issue within society. We're going to be looking at a minority group, about 2-5% of the U.S. population depending on the survey/study, who feel strongly compelled by their own consciences to live a different lifestyle than the average American.

When their movement first surfaced in the 70's, it was definitively illegal in some states, while others simply rejected it on the grounds of having no law permitting it. They proceeded to live as they felt compelled anyways, quietly and industriously, seeking to carve out individual exemptions that would simply allow them to live their lives as they saw fit. Over time, an organization developed that allowed them to deal with the government and courts with proper legal representation, but they did not seek to change the laws through the judicial system. They were simply settling individual cases.

In time, through writing letters and visiting the legislature, they proved bit by bit by their behavior that their lifestyle was validly non-destructive. They began to build a reputation of respect, achievement, and cooperation. States began to pass laws properly through the legislature permitting their lifestyle, but often with burdensome regulations. They accepted what they had hard-won, showed themselves willing to compromise, and worked to show by example that they could function equally without the extra government oversight. They did not assume that they could simply declare a right, even a valid one, and bully their way into it. Instead, they sought to show themselves worthy of it, confident that reasonable people would slowly be swayed by a good example.

Rallies were orderly, calm, and clean. They did not key anybody's cars. They did not threaten business owners. They did not assault elderly women or members of other religions. They did not vandalize, did not scream, did not perform obscene acts in public. They simply sought to prove by behaving properly that they were a valid part of society. Even with their lifestyle now legal (but often with heavy regulations) in all 5o states, they were not considered equal with the 'masses'. Employers and colleges refused them, and they were not allowed to serve in the military. They often lost health benefits and government benefits allowed to others, for nothing but their lifestyle status. They never screamed "Unfair!" Instead, they wrote letters, dissertations, made calm and reasoned speeches, and sought to persuade through logic.

It has now been over 30 years, and life is considerably easier for these people than it was at the beginning. Though they are often still harassed by government officials, social workers, and police simply for their lifestyle, they are allowed into most colleges and the military now accepts them. More people than ever before know somebody who lives this lifestyle, and opinion has become more and more favorable. They are proving by statistics that they are healthy, hardworking people, involved in volunteer work and more than pulling their weight in society. Though they recently nearly suffered a huge blow in California, they remained calm, and through appeal and well-reasoned evidence were able to keep from losing legal status there. They are making a place for themselves without treading on the rights of others. There is no law against believing their practices to be obscene, no 'hate crime' laws to benefit them above the general population, and they are not trying to force educators to teach schoolchildren about them.

Internationally, though many countries allow these people to practice their lifestyle, others persecute them, jailing them and forcing their families to flee to other countries for safety. One such family is currently petitioning asylum from their home country to the U.S. and is likely to get it due to the persecution there.

Are they gays?

Nope.

They are homeschoolers.

Missouri - reported November 18th
School system attempts to force a homeschooling family to comply with regulations far above and beyond those set forth by law. When the family refuses, they falsely report the children truant although the family is homeschooling legally in that state. Criminal charges are filed in the courts.

Ohio - reported November 7th
A homeschooling family is roundly criticized at their own doorstep by, of all people, the dog warden, who has shown up with police escort insisting to enter their home in order to inspect their (healthy and licensed) dog without a warrant. With police present, the warden said "They homeschool, too," prompting a diatribe from the police officer, who told the woman at the door that she was being a poor example and questioning her teaching skills.

Florida - reported November 6th
A social worker forces her way into a homeschooling family's home with the backup of two police officers. Refusing to disclose any allegations against them, she proceeds to partially strip-search one of the children who later turned out to not even be named in the allegation (an anonymous tip made months ago), in front of the officers and family, embarrassing the girl greatly. After threatening the father with handcuffs and removal of his children if he did not stop asserting (verbally, without violence) his Fourth Amendment rights, she then fully strip-searches all the children, male and female. Despite finding no evidence of abuse, she then insists that the entire family undergo a psychological examination.

Christian Conservatives and Charity, Part 3

2008-11-16T18:31:00.000-05:00

Christian Conservatives fear an Obama presidency with good reason. His government-coercion principles of 'wealth distribution' rob us of our ability to manage our own resources and remain responsible for what God has seen fit to bestow upon us. However, we must realize that right now, a total ban of government-funded social programs would not be fitting for modern culture. As we must have a dog trained to Come before we let it off the leash, we must train ourselves and educate others before we can remove the restraints of government-forced 'charity'. In this post, I would like to give recommendations for each of three financial categories in preparing our country for an eventual return to fiscal conservatism.

2. The Poor

Your job is actually not much more difficult than that of the Rich. You may have never thought of it that way, especially if you have bought into the culture of entitlement, which tells you to hate them for having what you "deserve". You're going to have an uphill climb in divesting yourself of that class hatred. Remember that, as the Spiderman move put it so nicely, with great power comes great responsibility. The material wealth that God will hold you accountable for is not as great a burden as on the rich, and though you have incentive to save and request help within the current social system, the rich have to remember charity despite the government seeking to remove that responsibility from their shoulders.

Remember that the Bible tells you very firmly to not envy another man's goods. God intends each person to carry on with what he or she is given, take on your own burdens, and do not waste your days wishing for someone else's. Enjoy your own home, your own family, and measure your success by your own efforts to improve.

As someone in genuine need, you are going to end up having to ask for help. If you have truly been doing your best, not having fallen into poverty from laziness, there is no shame in needing aid. When you are a single mother with many children, a sick or injured person with limited mobility, an elderly person living alone, you generally simply aren't in a position where you can do it all for yourself. You, the Middle Class, and the Rich should all remember that none of us, from the poorest to the richest, can reach salvation alone. Set aside your pride, survey your situation, understand what you truly need, and seek it out.

In a post-socialist society, receiving what you need is going to entail something much more difficult and rewarding than simply sending filled-out applications to faceless bureaucrats. Rather than an impersonal government seeking to provide for you, you will be dealing with real people who are truly helping you. They will have families, hopes, and dreams, and so will you. In sharing their blessings, you will be forming bonds outside of your financial standing and likely out of your age and race groups as well. The prospect is more daunting, but the rewards are significantly more substantial.

Work if you can. Your goal is to benefit from their generosity and use it to pull yourself up as far as you are able. In a truly Christian society, following properly the advice in the book of Romans, they will not be judging you for your progress and you will not be taking advantage of their willingness to help you. Perhaps you will never be able to become financially independent. That matters less than that you contribute what you are able.

What you can contribute will depend on your situation. Don't ever think yourself utterly useless. If you can't work and you can't walk, you can probably knit sweaters for babies and blankets for people in foreign countries. If you can't even do that, you can probably sit and listen. You'd be amazed how many 'rich' people would love just to have someone sit and listen for a while. As I'm addressing Christian Conservatives here, you know you can always pray for them as well.

The socialist wing of the liberals have likely done their best to undermine your confidence in God. Remember that you are mentioned explicitly in the Bible, several times, as people cared for by God. He will provide, and He will judge others by how they treat you.

A fly in Obama's ointment?

2008-11-14T08:02:00.002-05:00

Obama will be president in January. At the same time, a number of congressmen's terms will 'roll over' and the Democrats will be in the majority. Whatever's going to happen this Christmas season is going to happen. So why is Nancy Pelosi already making her own bold statements about things she intends to do by January? Why risk getting your proposals stalled in a Congress that hasn't yet turned to your side, when a little patience will give you all you could wish for?

As a woman who graduated from a quite liberal college and saw my share of the current feminist movement as a silent observer on the inside, I conjecture this reasoning: she wants the credit.

Here is the irony of modern feminism. Obama's greatest challenge, more so than dealing with the economy, foreign leaders who wish to test him, and the disastrous results of his own plans, may simply be dealing with Nancy Pelosi. One of the greatest burdens to the Liberals may just be a monster (I am not referring to Pelosi directly as the monster - you'll understand in a moment) created by themselves.

Now, there are some on the hard-conservative right who believe that women should not run for office (or pastor a church, or become a manager in the workplace). I love these people dearly, but I do disagree with them. Biblical submission of women very clearly works within the household, as a matter of God-ordained organization. Even the most conservative Americans agree with me that man and woman are, though not the same, certainly equal in gumption, intellect, and ability to be capable in their work. However, I go a step further, and note that women in Ancient Israel, even wives, did own their own property, manage their own merchant businesses, judge court cases, and even build cities and bridges which they named after themselves, all within the framework of a proper Biblical society. (In other words, this happened before It All Went Bad.)

The majority of conservative women, far from believing like the Muslims that every woman submits to every man, realizes that we are to submit with grace and love to our husbands and work on equal footing with any other, as Executive Officer of their families. I conduct business with male attorneys, salesmen, and customer service representatives, and I drive a hard bargain, all within the calm knowledge that I am exactly where God intends me to be.

Have you ever wondered why liberal female politicians seem scarier than conservative female politicians? The root of the answer is simple: while conservative female politicians are comfortable in their roles as feminine community leaders, liberal females are still fighting that traditional submission role that still echoes in our Biblically-derived society. In short, liberal feminists are more than just non-submissive. After all, conservative women are not submissive to men who are not in God-ordained positions of leadership over them. No, liberal feminists are anti-submissive.

A liberal feminist wants more than to just avoid being submissive to her husband, if she happens to be married. No, she has to continually prove to herself and everyone else that she is submissive to NO MAN, in no circumstance. Once Woman grabs for power and prestige, she becomes a rather frightening creature, insecure in her femininity, willing to go further and fight fiercer than most male politicians, who tend to be quite secure in their own authority.

Remember the Democratic primary? What kept it so interesting? Long after the other runners-up had graciously stepped back to make way for this "new rising star", Hillary continued to fight tooth and nail. As long as she saw a chance at winning, the slightest chance of breaking even with Obama, she tore him to shreds with such efficiency that the Republican party spent most of their time merely repeating attacks she had already launched.

Now the question is this: will Nancy Pelosi put aside her own desire for power and her strong inclination to show that she submits to No Man in order to put Obama's plan, in Obama's wording, into law, and allow him the credit he will seek? Or are we going to see a power play based on little more than feminist self-righteousness? Or is he going to be the one to give way in the face of her sheer determination? I'll be watching in the next months.

On a similar subject...

2008-11-12T09:23:00.002-05:00

I've been explaining issues like taxation, social mores, and charity from the perspective of a Christian Conservative, which is a bit different than just the straight logical conservative view. As a Christian Conservative, I am quite free to use theology as well as logic in explaining my stances. However, let me set that aside for a moment, and offer the reader a chance to learn something from a purely logical-political point of view.

These videos explain the Laffer Curve and it's effects on taxation.

The Laffer Curve, Part I: Understanding the Theory

The Laffer Curve, Part II: Reviewing the Evidence

The Laffer Curve, Part III: Dynamic Scoring

Christian Conservatives and Charity, Part 2

2008-11-11T11:28:00.003-05:00

Christian Conservatives fear an Obama presidency with good reason. His government-coercion principles of 'wealth distribution' rob us of our ability to manage our own resources and remain responsible for what God has seen fit to bestow upon us. However, we must realize that right now, a total ban of government-funded social programs would not be fitting for modern culture. As we must have a dog trained to Come before we let it off the leash, we must train ourselves and educate others before we can remove the restraints of government-forced 'charity'. In this post, I would like to give recommendations for each of three financial categories in preparing our country for an eventual return to fiscal conservatism.

1. The Rich

Under the current system, you earn roughly 30% of the nation's income and pay roughly 60% of the nation's taxes. I have heard many complain about the disproportionate burden you bear, simply for trying to succeed. In extreme cases, you've deliberately avoided further success for fear of lowering your after-tax income, not just the percentage, but the income itself. I can't blame you for losing your spirit. Why work harder when you will be not only rewarded less, but downright punished? Still, this despair, this abandonment of effort, is a key part in a strategy among those who promote class hatred to bring you down. Without your balance and generosity, a post-socialist system will not work.

First off, remember that it is good for the human being to work. The Rich are often prone to mental and physical health problems that are less apt to afflict the workers, simply because of their lives of leisure. Granted, they are also safeguarded from problems that afflict those who work too hard with no leisure, especially without proper food and warmth, but they are not necessarily any more at their peak than the overworked. There is an increasing belief in this society that the right way to find happiness is to get a lot of money and pursue worldly pleasures for as long as you please. You, being a Christian, know better. If by your income you are self-sufficient, consider volunteering.

Secondly, you of all people must continue to manage your money effectively. Right now the government takes a large portion of it for government-coerced charity. When that changes, the people they help will still be there, as will those who suffer as they fall 'between the cracks'. Now's the time to be aware of where you can help those in need. Investigate charities and how they work. Choose your methods of charity. Remember that you will be reporting to God how you used the money available to you and why. The more released from the government's clutches, the more you will be accountable for.

Thirdly, remember to prosper. That sounds like a strange thing to say, doesn't it? Note that prospering is not the same as living a luxury lifestyle. The badly-termed "prosperity gospel" does not actually involve true prospering at all. Prospering, thriving, booming, growing... all involve increasing the wealth at your disposal, not just having a fancy car or lots of vacations. God prospers all the more those who give willingly and out of a cheerful heart, in part because the more you have, the more you are able to give.

Giving willingly is another thing that human beings were made to do and thrive by doing. It has measurable health benefits and brings happiness to the giver and the receiver. Of course, as a Christian, you know that even if there were no benefits God still wishes you to become a generous person. It's a wonderful thing, isn't it, that the way He wants you to be is the healthiest way for you to live?

Christian Conservatives and Charity, Part 1

2008-11-11T10:37:00.004-05:00

I have been listening to someone on another forum who appreciates fiscal conservatism, but would discard social conservatism. That would be a grave error. Liberalism is like a cell, locking us in a small room and telling us that within that small room we may do as we please. Conservatism is setting us free... but a free man must have constraints on his behavior, or it is an act of unkindness to give him his liberty. Social conservatism is made up of those restraints, while fiscal conservatism is our freedom.

Conservatives Christians have been instructed by God Himself to see that their society cares for the poor. While liberals, even liberal Christians, would seek government seizure and redistribution towards this end, Conservative Christians consider the myriads of Bible passages confirming the importance of owning your own property and being personally responsible for it's use. Even slaves in the Old Testament could own their own property, and even married women, under the guidelines of submission, were encouraged to own and profit from their personal holdings apart from their husbands.

This theme of voluntary generosity is carried into the New Testament, in which we find that the sin of Ananias and Sapphire was not merely greed, but lying to put on a false show of piety. The words I find telling in this passage, found at the end of Acts chapter 4 and the beginning of Acts chapter 5, is the following explanation: "Before you sold the land, was it not your own? And when you had sold it, was the money not in your control?" Peter was making it clear that the 'socialism' shown by the early Christians was entirely voluntary. I have mostly abandoned for now my effort to get all the way through the Koran, but as an interesting contrast, the beginning parts of the Koran insist that mandatory charity is one of the necessities to earn paradise.

Why is charity urged, but not detailed and coerced, in the Bible? Christianity is a bit more complicated than most world religions. Rather than being a simple to-do list, it is about transformation into a certain kind of person. Instead of constantly going to a 'well' to draw out virtues of the soul, we are to be a 'spring of water' out of which these virtues naturally bubble out and overflow. Telling us exactly what we must give and why would do us little good if we are ever to be mature Christians seeking Jesus of our own accord. That is why the kind of control shown by a socialistic government is absent from the Bible, leaving us only with the command to become a generous people, and the sense that if we do so, proper care of the poor will naturally follow.

Parable of the Jacuzzi

2008-11-09T10:23:00.000-05:00

One day the king who ruled the land decided to go visit some of his peasants. He was rather surprised to see the sorry state of their house and asked if there was anything he could do for them.
"Yes," the peasant father said. "You take such a high percentage of our goods as tax. If you took a lower percentage, then we could sell what we did not eat and fix the house."

This did not appeal to the king, however, and in his incredible generosity chose to give them a jacuzzi, so that their backs would not hurt and they could work more hours for him.

Years later, he revisited, to see that they had not prospered as he had hoped. The jacuzzi sat empty and dry in the back yard of the increasingly shabby house. "What is this?" he demanded. "Why aren't you using the jacuzzi I gave you so that your backs wouldn't hurt and you could work longer hours?"

"Sire, we can't afford the water to fill the jacuzzi, or the electricity to run it," the peasant father tried to explain. "In addition, it is taking up part of the yard that I could have used for gardening, and we are producing even less than before. Please take it back and give us more of our goods back instead. We know what we need, and if we only have the means, we can do it ourselves."

But the king left, angered that his subjects were so inconsiderate as to not profit from his generosity.

I am the full-time homemaker of a single-income family in the Working-Class income area. We lose 15% of our income altogether to income taxes and other mandatory government social programs. We cannot apply for Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, food stamps, or even heat assistance. We have no guarantee of Social Security.

Obama wants to give us extended preschool which we won't use, extended after-school programs that our homeschooled kid is not allowed to join, daycare money that we don't need, and credits for buying a "clean" car that we can't afford. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, though I know he is not listening...

Stop giving us jacuzzi's, Obama! Let us keep more of our own goods! Then we can sell what we do not eat and fix the house!

What should we do now?

2008-11-06T06:50:00.002-05:00

As some of those who follow this blog might have guessed by some of my previous posts, I am not a hard-left liberal Democrat, which means my politics are not those of our president-elect. Though my politics lean towards Libertarian, my actual worldview is probably best described as Conservative Christian. Yesterday was not a very nice day for Conservative Christians.

I had my moment of despair, an entire hour early in the morning, and I pulled together. That's something that the Conservative Christian does better than many other worldviews. God is still in control, and we are not to worry unduly about the future, because it will take care of itself. God gives us the grace we need to deal with our current situation, and when I have to I can focus very small until I reach the point where I know what to do next. Sometimes in these troubled times that focus narrows down to "take the clothes out of the washing machine", which I do. I immediately begin to feel better.

Then I began hearing from other troubled friends, some conservative, some Christian, some moderate, some liberal. Some were telling me that everything would work out fine now because they had faith in their candidate's economic plan. As a conservative, I find his plan makes no realistic sense, so that was not much help. A fellow Conservative Christian reminded me that God is on His throne and hasn't stopped caring for us, and that is the word I began to spread, because that's how we think.

So for those who have wandered, like I did until my fellows reminded me, into the mire of worldly fears and frantic worries, what should we do now?

Live.

I might not know what to do if my taxes are raised, but I know that the laundry needs doing, and there's a package of sugar cookie dough that is going to go bad if it's not used, and my son needs his homeschooling lesson done. My mother's car is being repaired and I'm providing rides for her meanwhile. So I can't just sit paralyzed with fears that God did not mean for me to carry; I need to hand those fears over to Him along with my entire future, and go get ready for the present trial.

And as I do I realize that the present trial isn't really all that bad. Sugar cookies are fun to roll out and decorate with my son. My mother's a great conversationalist and we're good friends, so no car ride with her is ever dull or painful. The laundry is laundry, no worse than it's ever been, and there is such a good feeling when I know my clothing is clean and in it's drawers.

How will Conservative Christians live for the next few years, with liberal extremism in office? Sure, it can be done. I'll try to push myself to write the thoughts always swirling in my head and tell you more about how in the coming days. But for right now, I simply say this: Work, play, laugh, love, and learn. The presidential election did not take away your home or vanish your to-do list. Prepare for winter and save your money. God will take care of the future.

Pushing Lifestyle Through Taxes

2008-11-01T08:12:00.002-04:00

I have been watching this election season avidly, scrutinizing the candidates' plans, and discovered in dismay that one has managed to dupe us with promises of more and more money... unless you make over $250K/year. Or maybe it's $200K/year. It might be $150K/year. As of yesterday, it was $120K/year, which puts the "rich folk" label on a dual wage-earner household in which both members have middle-class jobs. But that's besides the point. The Democrats have been inciting class hatred for decades now.

What struck me about this new plan is the part that almost nobody is talking about. Obama's plan is touted as a tax cut, but it actually is not a tax cut at all. His plan involves tons of new tax credits. There are two important differences between the two. The first is that a tax cut reduces the amount of money that government takes from you, while a tax credit increases the amount that the government gives back. The second, and the focus of my post today, is that tax cuts apply according to income regardless of lifestyle, while you must qualify for a tax credit by meeting a special set of circumstances.

A lot of people have been offering me a website that supposedly asks you a few questions and calculates how much more money Obama plans to give you. I checked the site myself and found that my number is very, very low. So low, in fact, that the Bush tax cuts "for the rich" gave me more money than Obama is promising me, even as he desires to roll back those cuts. Basically, I will come out on the bad side if he is elected. Am I rich?

Obama's Families In Trouble on his half-hour infomercial made me laugh. One woman worries that she won't be able to stock as much snack food in her fridge. Another woman, sporting a $40/month acrylic nail job, mourns about the difficulty she has buying milk. Look, hon, I do nothing with my nails so I can afford milk.

My husband makes a decent wage, and I am a homemaker and homeschooling mother. That combination puts us in the same income level as "Working Class", and the only thing that would technically push us into "Lower Middle Class" is my husband's job type. We have a fixed-rate mortgage that we staunchly refused to convert to variable-rate when the interest levels for variable bounced to 1%, mostly because we already knew that they would rise above 10% at some point in the next thirty years. People don't seem to know how to plan further than the next five years anymore.

Our tax burden, federal, state, Social Security, and Medicaid all comes up to about 20% of our income. Our mortgage payment is over half of our net income. We pay next for electricity, auto insurance, and phone service (including internet). We own both our cars outright. We do not own a cell phone, not even an emergency plan. With all of that, the rest of our income is spent on food and gas, plus any emergencies, mostly auto repair, that demand a response. We have no entertainment budget.

Our food budget is 2/3rds of what a family our size would get on welfare, and it will be a little over half that when the baby is born. We actually took the unusual step of applying for energy assistance this year, and found that we were only $500/year over the mark. That puts us, by the way, just above 150% of the state poverty level. You would think Obama would be falling all over himself to help us, right? Why will his new plan benefit us almost nothing? Simple: we do not fit into his 'poor person lifestyle'. In plainer talk, we don't qualify for his tax credits, which include:

* Doubling the earned income tax credit if you pay child support
* $4K tax credit if you paid college tuition
* $7K tax credit if you bought a "clean car"
* $6K tax credit if you pay for daycare

So basically, since my husband has not abandoned his family, neither of us are in college, we can't afford to buy a car, and I choose to raise our children myself, we don't qualify for any of those Obama Tax Credits. There are more, of course, and we don't qualify for them either. Education tax credits do not apply to homeschoolers, etc.

So it doesn't matter to Obama that next spring we will have a food budget nearly half of that from a family on welfare, or that we are likely to put our winter oil tank fill on the credit card because we simply do not have it in the bank, even though we do not make any of the poor choices that land many other families in poverty. This is not class warfare anymore. We are "rich", not because we make a lot of money, but because we don't live the way he expects us to. Perhaps, and this is admittedly a conjecture, we do not live the way that contributes to the socialist society the Democrats wish to impose. And so we must be punished until we fall into line.

Already my husband knows of coworkers, even in his white-collar workplace, who choose not to marry their girlfriends for the simple reason that the state will provide for them better then their men can. One in particular, with full intention to be a good father to his girlfriend's baby, nevertheless waited until the child was born before marriage so that the state would provide her with the prenatal care she needed, the care that he could not provide himself, even as he was taxed at or near the same 20%-when-counting-federal/state/SS/etc. rate that my husband and I suffer under.

I say 'suffer', but we're holding our own. Even on such a small food budget, I still provide good meals for my family by resorting to beans, rice, potatoes, and other simple and unpackaged foods. The woman in Obama's infomercial with snacks in her refrigerator made me simply shake my head, because we simply cannot afford any snack foods in our budget. According to Obama, she needs more help than we do.

This is no longer just about Democratic class warfare. This is about the government rewarding some lifestyles over others. If you try to work hard, live frugally, and trouble no man, raising your children within the framework of a traditional family, the Democrats do not care about you.

9/11 celebration

2008-09-11T14:13:00.000-04:00

This morning, I lit candles on the dining room table, which I do for special days or when I just feel like it. I did it today for 9/11, for the planes and the towers and the people and the silent skies for weeks afterwards.

That isn't the extent of my observance, though.

9/11 isn't just a day to solemnly read names of the dead, to mourn the towers, and to watch the flaming footage again and again and again. It's more than that now, as we hit Year 7 after the first event and take a look at what has and hasn't happened.

Civilians in many other countries live in fear.. or despite the fear.. of terrorist attack. They know any place they go could suddenly end up engulfed in flames, shrapnel flying in all directions. They know they are part of a war zone that, unlike the usual gentlemanly rules of war, is targeted at them.

On 9/11, those terrorists tried to make us one of those places. They failed.

Now, this is the day we acknowledge that. This day reminds us that we struck back. Bin Laden said "Submit" and we said "Submit THIS!" So today I light candles in the morning and then I say "Submit this!"

I'm about to head out to do my foodshopping without fear, knowing that whatever awaits me there, a suicide vest will not even be a remote possibility. Then I'm going to go home and cook a good party dinner. We're going to eat pork! I don't often have pig products just because my stomach doesn't always take to it well, but today is different! Today is the day we eat pork and celebrate, because we are not afraid.

I won't be watching any news/television broadcasts, but we might put on a movie or play video games later.

Anybody who wishes to 'steal my idea' may do so with utter impunity. Remember. Don't forget. Don't lose sight of it. But don't despair, and grieve only as befits you. Then go find your own way of saying "Submit this!"

Anti-anti-feminism? Or not quite?

2008-09-01T10:38:00.005-04:00

Since McCain has made his unexpected VP pick, forums and blogs everywhere have been alight. Especially in the media areas where I watch, suddenly everyone wants to talk about this not-unknown-for-long woman, governor of a state most people don't even think about on a semi-regular basis.

I, being a bit of an 'anti-feminist', track sites with similar beliefs, of course, and I've been surprised to see an ultra-conservative backlash against this VP pick. I've been even more surprised to find that I, usually pretty nearly solid in my agreement with them, find myself a bit at odds. There are two main areas in dispute, and I plan to lay out my own thoughts on each one separately.

1. Sarah Palin, being a mother of young children, especially one with Down Syndrome, should be at home taking care of them.

I'm not sure where people who worry over this think the Palin children and husband actually are. I recommend http://www.mccainblogette.com/postings/083008_0928.shtml for an answer. In case you don't feel like wading through the pictures, I can tell you myself... her family is with her. For hours and sometimes days between campaign trips, she will have plenty of time to spend with husband and children, feeding her baby and snuggling with him. She may well have more time to spend with her family than any mother who is not homeschooling. Even during events, her family are no further away from backstage, and, increasingly, out in the front alongside her.

Palin is headed for a position that allows her to work in the same building that she and her family will live. The other working women afforded her level of flexibility, mostly schoolteachers, small business owners, or telecommuters, are often in the ranks of the anti-feminist groups and accepted by them. What is the difference here? It may have something to do with the second issue: Authority.

2. What's a woman doing taking authority over men? Indeed, placing herself in the line of succession for the most powerful job in the country?

Well, women in Ancient Israel might have taken issue with this question. As I said before, I agree with anti-feminist groups largely for the most part. In this area, though, I have some concern that they are taking an extremist position against an extremist position rather than looking to restore a proper balance. From wives frequently ruling their husbands, they push for a time when women are more or less ruled by men. I take a different tack, and one that I believe to be Biblically supported.

As I just mentioned, women in Ancient Israel might take issue with this view. During the Golden Ages of Israel, women had a great many rights not allowed to those in 1700's America, which even then was not the time of terrible oppression feminists claim it to be. In Ancient Israel, not only could women own and inherit property, but they had equal access to the courts and equal access with non-Levites to the Temple.

The Bible, when it speaks of submission to men, is clearly laying out the proper roles within a family. The husband is the CO, and the wife is the XO. However, these positions hold only within the family. As an example, when I conduct family business outside the home, I am not subordinate to any man with whom I may deal. My position as XO of the family trumps his position as outside the family, and he will not induce me to do anything against my family's betterment simply for the sake of being male. This position was supported even in America of the 1800's. If the husband died, the widow owned his property and cast votes in the family name.

A lot of people have been quoting the Old Testament case of Deborah as 'proof' that having a woman take a position of power over men outside of the family is a shameful thing. However, there are numerous instances of Old Testament women judging in the gates, owning and profiting from their own land and businesses (even married women), founding cities, and building bridges. In the New Testament, women commonly founded and led early churches, and Paul had plenty of them to greet and bless in each of his letters. There are two sets of verses usually used against this, but I believe one of them actually supports women's authority and the other is taken out of context.

The first involves women praying with their head covered (or with long hair). People claim that these verses establish all women as subserviant to all men as a matter of nature. "For God is the head of man, but man is the head of woman, and man was not created for woman, but woman for man." What they seem to be missing is the import of the last verse: "For this reason and for the angels, women should pray with a symbol of authority on their heads." This line of reasoning does not end with "women serving men is a matter of nature." It follows on to say, "Because nature suggests that women do not have the authority of men, women should pray with a symbol of authority on their heads." We are different than men, and we take different roles in marriage, but we are not lesser in God's eyes.

The second is a little trickier. After several occasions of Paul talking about how we are all equal in Christ, man and woman, free and slave, after all the times he's cheered on the women leaders in the church, suddenly he declares that "the women shouldn't teach" because "Adam was formed first, and Eve was the one who sinned first." What's he talking about? Many people have taken it to mean that no woman should teach any man, but if you look at the context, you see a slightly different story.

Paul wrote his famous statement to Timothy, in Ephesus. Ephesus was home to the Diana cult. (Diana is also known as Artemis.) In Acts, we got to read about this cult causing a riot and nearly getting the early Christians in a lot of trouble. It turns out that their troublemaking had not ended there. The cult was very feminist-minded, and members who joined churches began distorting Scripture to suit themselves. "Eve was created first, before Adam," they'd teach loudly. "Eve did not sin, so women are not under the same curse as men."

Now his statement makes much more sense when taken with his previous affirmation of female leaders, doesn't it? "Timothy, your women need to stop preaching. Adam was created first, not Eve, and Eve did sin... she's not excluded from the sin curse."

On the matter of women in authority, by the way, my mother had a very interesting take on it. A housewife and mother for about as long as I've been alive, she pointed out that political leadership involves administrating the will of the people and has since the peasants forced the King of England to sign the Magna Carta. "Women make excellent administrators," she pointed out.

To conclude, I'd like to point out that the loudest people speaking against Palin's position due to her sex are not the conservative Christians. They are the liberals, particularly the liberal feminists. Why are they on this tack? Why do they care? They don't, to be honest. But they'll do anything they can, including trying to use our own arguments on us, to prevent her from winning this election. I hope to predict that they will fail because they do believe the bad light they cast us in, the distorted view that we believe woman is inherently inferior to man, that holding values mean we must crucify anyone who doesn't live up to our standard, and that "it's important for mothers to raise their children" means "mothers had better not move from the kitchen... ever!"

Do-Nothing Democrats

2008-08-06T09:04:00.002-04:00

The oil situation in my country is mirrored neatly by the water situation in my town, and the crux of the problem lies with the same people: the Democrats who are in charge.

My town is currently under an extreme water shortage. Residents are not allowed to water their lawns, wash their cars, or even water their vegetable gardens. Luckily, the last hasn't been too terrible, because this was the fourth wettest July on record, and June was also considerably wetter than normal. The rain has soaked the ground, filling streams nearly to overflowing. Every time it rains, as it's doing today, there are flood watches across the state. Half the time, they turn into flood warnings in one area or another.

Does this sound contradictory? It should. The United States is sitting on a wealth of oil, and my town is sitting on a wealth of water. So why are prices high? Why is my town under water restriction of the highest order?

One of the town wells broke down and has not been repaired. Another one was taken offline, I'm not sure exactly why, leaving only one well to service the entire area. The people voted into charge of my town are overwhelmingly Democrat, as our Congress currently has Democratic control of both houses, and they have not repaired either of the two wells in reserve nor sought to drill a third. We have a reservoir in town, kept off-limits and unused. There was some talk in a town meeting half a year ago of opening the reservoir to supplement the single well, but it has not yet happened.

The local Democrats have, however, secured a multi-million grant from the state in order to vastly reduce the debt we are about to take on in purchasing a large area of recreational forest. It's a very pretty property and, once the lead cleanup finishes and a large-scale poison ivy eradication effort is undertaken, may even be safe to visit.

The Congressional Democrats have turned out the lights on the Republicans, who are even now standing in the dark telling the Democrats and the rest of the country that the working poor need to be able to get to work and keep their houses warm in the upcoming winter.

I think we need some Republicans at my town hall telling the Democrats that their citizens need water.