Saturday Morning Thoughts

With Deb away, I guess its up to Geoff and I to make sure that there is something for Deb’s readers to consider on this day, and since Geoff doesn’t really post anything, it appears that it falls to me.

So this morning, I read about a  new translation of the Bible, that is “easier to comprehend”. 

Professor David Capes says the Bible “is probably the most owned and least read book out there. That’s because, for many, it’s too difficult to understand.”

The “own it but haven’t read it” demographic is his target market, says Capes, who teaches the New Testament at Houston Baptist University and was part of a team that compiled “The Voice,” a new translation of the King James Bible. Capes told CNN that the motivation behind the translation, seven years in the making, was to emphasize the meaning behind the words.

“‘The Voice’ considers the narrative links that help us to understand the drama and passion of story that is present in the original languages,” according to the website for the book. “The tone of the writing, the format of the page, and the directness of the dialog allows the tradition of passing down the biblical narrative to come through in ‘The Voice.’”

I really have mixed feelings about this.  While there are several translations of the Bible that are the result of years of translation from original greek texts, that have allowed for a deeper, richer understanding.  This still requires an effort from the reader, and it is precisely the difficulty in understanding certain portions that causes me to read from these translations in the first place. 

But what makes this different is the fact that it is someone re-writing a King James Version because it is too difficult to understand.  This smacks of the same thinking in which people denigrate the Constitution, because it is too hard to understand, or refuse to read the Federalist Papers because they are difficult, or CS Lewis’ apologetics, or…well, you get the point.  It isn’t the average person who benefits when such books are “dumbed down”, and it empowers the ones doing the dumbing down.  You don’t value what you don’t pay for, and when this version has abandoned the use of “angel”, “Christ”, and “apostle”, I don’t get a sense that it ends well.  It smacks a little too much of the continual “redefinition” of all things being forced upon us in other parts of culture and society.

2011…The Year When The Stupid Stupefied.

I suppose it was bound to happen. We’ve been building up to it for years, indoctrinating our youth instead of teaching them to think, and creating a climate where the right not to be offended was more cherished than the right to speak plainly, with the full knowledge that the intended recipients should be ashamed, rather than offended. Still, for me at least, it felt like in 2011, stupid reached critical mass, and started a chain reaction of stupid in everything that it touched. And as I watched, I felt…ennui.

I know that it, and other things kept shouting at my muse this year, until I rarely heard her sweet song, enticing me to tap out far fewer lines than I normally would. I just find it difficult to be either insightful or entertaining when my response to 93% of the headlines is “DUH!” and my response to 5% of the remaining 7% really shouldn’t be repeated in polite company anyway.

It was a year when we saw a key economic partner crippled by earthquakes and tsunamis, giving much fodder but little fact to the anti-nuke hysterics. A story that then faded from our conscience as our news outlets found new stories to hyperventilate about, despite the fact that the real story will continue to unfold for years.

It was yet another year when dissent equaled racism in the eyes of the people who believe their opinions should be our own, and tell us so at every opportunity. It isn’t surprising though. The criticism equals racism meme was getting almost as lonely as it was tired.

It was the year when spoiled entitled youth from across the country mounted a frontal assault on the very same capitalism that made it possible to tweet the “revolution” from their iPhones and blog about it on their Macbooks.

It was the year that the middle east erupted in protests against despotic leaders, so they could replace them with…despotic leaders…and terrorists. And in at least one case, it wasn’t enough for the Duffer-in-Chief to “Bear Witness”…he made sure we helped to replace the devil we knew with the one we didn’t. (Go ahead…call this racist, it won’t make you right or me wrong.)

It was a year in which we saw the Federal Government sue states for trying to enforce the same laws that the Federal Government refused to.  And it was a year in which we learned of the most incompetent plan to track illegal firearms and activies with them EVER…a plan that could only exist to curtail a Constitutional right, not make anyone safer.  Just ask Brian Terry, and scores of Mexican citizens…oh, that’s right…you can’t.  And, as predictable as Grandpa going to the bathroom after breakfast with the newspaper tucked under his arm, calling for the resignation of the Attorney General who appears to have known all about it is….wait for it…RACIST!!!!

It was the year in which we learned that needing an ID to drive, buy booze and cigarettes, apply for credit, get an apartment, and go to college was NOT racist, but requiring it before you let someone cast a ballot, IS. (Thank you, Uncle Facts.)

It was the year when our elected officials received the clearest warning yet given from the financial sector that spending more than it takes in is an invitation to ruin and doom…and their response was to ignore the real issue, point fingers at each other, and keep spending money it doesn’t have on things it has no lawful authority to do. I wish the stupid was confined to the government on this point, but our shame is double, since we keep letting them do this. I can’t think of any other situation where we hire people to perform certain duties for us, for which we pay them sums certain, only to have them decide that they also have to feed everyone in the next state, clothe them, make sure they get medical care, and in order to do it, they take out loans in our name, without our consent, and tell us that it will be fine, because it will actually be our kids and grandkids paying the loans back.

I’d like to live just long enough to see those same little children who were singing the creepy “dear leader-esque” songs to the serial vacationer in the Oval Office shouting his name in anger when they are all in their 40s, living in efficiency apartments and clothed in rags as they service the debt to pay off the Spendulous slush funds and payoffs, furious that he and the Senate that hasn’t passed a budget in years so blatantly stole their futures from them so they could live very comfortably in the now. I am sure that when my own sons are grown adults, Senator Reid’s name will be synonymous with corruption, shortsightedness, and FAIL!

It was the year in which we heard an entire party that at least understands the differences between an America that is strong, prosperous, and exceptional, as opposed to one that is gripped by economic decline and malaise, without focus, vision, or unity, decried as evil, mean people who want blacks hanging from trees, and old people and kids with autism to starve.

It was a year when an athlete who openly practiced his faith became a punchline for people too cowardly or too lazy to find and keep their own. And still, he prays. Thank you for that.

It was another year when those who believed in nothing, and had no standards or goals past living another year, and getting whatever they could continued to mock and critique those who do. It was another year when decency was something uttered with a sneer by people who could not or refused to find it in themselves.

It was another year when truth was there to be found by anyone diligent and humble enough to seek it, and accept it for what it is. It was a year in which I learned even more about the “Why?” relating to the design, and to my sorrow, many of the points of deviation.

It was a year when certain divisions became more pronounced, and certain outcomes began to feel more inevitable. It was sobering, and frustrating when I could see where so many people either sleepwalk through it, quietly accept it, or worst of all, embrace it.

My resolution for 2012? To make myself speak, rather than letting this show stun me in to silence for another year. I’m no different from many of you. I’ll be swept along in the tide of events along with every other average Joe and Jill.

But I’ll be damned if I go quietly.

Because I Always Expect A PRIVATE Institution to Accomodate My Different Faith When I Voluntarily Attend It…

Because it would be totally reasonable for me to attend a PRIVATE Islamic university and expect them to provide a chapel on the grounds for me, right? Right?

New charges have recently been filed against the [Catholic] University [of America] on counts of illegal discrimination against its Muslim and female students. The allegations are being reviewed by the District of Colombia Office of Human Rights (OHR), which has the strictest discrimination laws in the country. President John H. Garvey and the University is being urged to respond to the charges.

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The official allegations claim that CUA, “does not provide space – as other universities do – for the many daily prayers Muslim students must make, forcing them instead to find temporarily empty classrooms where they are often surrounded by Catholic symbols which are incongruous to their religion,” according to a press release on PRLOG.com.

If I were the University Board of Regents, and the Provost, I think I’d come to the conclusion that perhaps there is no need for these students to return next semester. But maybe that’s because I know there would be no reciprocity at an Islamic University.

From the University’s Newspaper, The Tower.

Linked by The Anchoress, thanks!

This What Educational Failure Looks Like

The expression is that “A picture is worth a thousand words”.

This one is the ultimate intellectual expression of the American Left. In it, one sees the contempt that they have for other people’s achievements, and those who help perpetuate society by safeguarding those achievements and keeping the peace. Any discussion of the inconvenient truth that no matter WHO leads it, Marx/Commu/Socialism will never work is wasted on people who can find eloquence in excrement.  They are blind to a political and economic system that allows the individual to “pursue happiness” by taking responsibility for their own destiny, rather than being yoked to a collective standard chosen by other people.

I have had exchanges with some of the #OWS (Occupy Wall Street) supporters this week on Twitter.  All condemn the “greed” of Wall Street, while being completely blind to their own envy and sense of entitlement to what these “evil” greedy people have. They rail against corporations for their lack of “accountability to the people”, and refuse to acknowledge that corporations answer to their shareholders and the government, and were designed that way, instead of focusing their attentions on the people who were always intended to be accountable to them: elected officials.

They tell their sob stories of hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt for their MFA degrees and living in parents’ basements, unable to get food stamps for their cats, or jobs that allow them to pay back their student loans. Each adds their plaintive voices to a chorus of whiny stories that call themselves “We Are the 99%” as opposed to the evil, greedy 1% of rich people who they feel entitled to “take” from. I’d call them “We Are The Falsely Entitled”. They talk about “new” economic models where workers have a say in how businesses are run, and how they have to “collapse the system” in order to build a society that is “fair” and doesn’t pick winners and losers, which is utter nonsense.  If society didn’t pick winners and losers, then you should be able to go to the corner store and purchase an ice cold Chrystal Pepsi for yourself.  They are immune to the suggestion that it is reasonable and understandable to be angry about a government that picks winners and losers, when its role is to act as referree.

This insistence on “fairness” is the expression of the naive and those blinded by envy, both of whom are eminently willing to surrender a potential that they have been tricked into thinking that they do not have, or that they are too afraid to command for themselves, to people only too willing to harness for their own ends. In either event, their childish notion of “fairness” pervades their demands and beliefs. A fairness that betrays opportunity for a physical equality, doled out by beneficent “rulers” who decide what is best for all and make it the assigned task for society.

But what I find the most offensive is that this segment of society, clinging to their Noam Chomsky readers, talking about the need for greater Democracy everywhere, and approving of every new law made by activist federal courts over the last 40 years utterly rejects the Democratic apparatus we already have.  It is urgent to “collapse the system” because “The Corporations” make all the choices for them, leaving the voter with only Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee when the time comes to cast the ballots. When you point out the flaws in this thinking, such as the success that the Tea Party had in backing and electing candidates in 2010, they only offer the electronic equivalent of a blank stare, followed by “That can’t be right. I saw all about the Tea Party is bad on MSNBC.”

When you suggest that if they really are the 99%, then it should be any problem for them to field and elect their own candidates, the only response is mumbling about corruption. And when you suggest that they simply don’t have the right to “collapse” a system that everyone else in society relies on, and has built their lives around, then they don’t have much to say at all, other than to condemn you as one of the 1% or as someone being led by the nose by that 1%.

As ridiculous as they appear to be, their ignorance and their appetites are dangerous. This is a mob that largely has no understanding of civics, of their political history, both the one that is their birthright, and the one they stupidly embrace, and yet believe that society can and should provide them with a life free from want, difficulty, or hard labor. They demonstrate no understanding that the democracy they cry out for is, at its core, only what 50%+1 wants, or that without safeguards for the minorities that are part of the system they want to collapse, they will inevitably be part of the 49%. While I don’t want to spare them the impact of learning that lesson firsthand, I do not want to live in the environment that would teach them, because revolutions are messy, and the temptation for the rest of the world to interfere is too great.  That means that we HAVE to engage them, and let them know that they are nowhere near being 99%, and that the only reason this has gone on this long is because the rest of us had to get up and go to work in the morning.

Crossposted at Taxes, Stupidity, and Death.

Another Thing We Can Thank The First Amendment For

Paul Krugman.

No.  Seriously.

I really am thankful that the First Amendment protects the vile nonsense that he spews.  Not because I enjoy him proving with each column the utter meaninglessness of being a Nobel Prize Winner, but because it makes him feel secure in revealing who he is, namely a slimy little toad who thinks nothing of disparaging men whose boots he isn’t fit to lick, let alone fill.

Krugman eagerly attacks men who stepped up to lead when it was required of them.  Bush never complained about “inheriting” Bin Laden from his predecessor.  Giuliani never whined about the “bad luck” that befell his city on that sunny autumn morning.  Instead, Giuliani went to help coordinate the response to the attack, and he himself was temporarily trapped at the command center.  Bush went to Ground Zero for those of us who couldn’t go ourselves, and personally carried the thanks of a grateful nation to those whose profound sadness and mourning we all carried on that day.  And then he put the resolve of a wounded nation into words, and directed it in a fashion that took the fight to those who thought they humbled us on that day.

Paul Krugman doesn’t live in the same world as the rest of America.  Every word he types, every “nuance” that he utters in the service of a worldview that misplaces its hope and drips contempt for anyone who believes not in the justice of redistribution and Keynesian economics, but in the power of the individual, and the government that would respect it, rather than restrain it, and every fantasy to empower the government he would worship tells us all that we need to know about him.  And that’s a good thing.

In a world where such a small person can lash out at people who can’t help but to be better than him, we can all count ourselves lucky that he and others like him not only reveal their true character, but their tragic lack of understanding.  It is good that such would-be tyrants, and others like him can show themselves without any modicum of self-reflection or shame, because then we are all put on notice of exactly who they are, and that all of us can fulfill one of the many duties we each have as citizens, and keep such people from gaining any more power than they already have by challenging all of the false assumptions and conclusions foisted upon us by people who let their jealousies blind them to the nature of evil, and the ability to discern what it is.  I thank God for the wisdom he gave to the Framers who made such that we had such freedoms, knowing full well the capacity for their abuse, and I thank the generations of men and women who made sacrifices to defend the flag that waves over all our heads today, and the guarantees we enjoy because of it.  And I thank God for those who looked upon the dust and rubble that settled over lower Manhattan on that day and put their lives on the line to make sure that Krugman, Bloomberg, and others could continue to show their contempt for the things that continue to make this country great.

Cross-posted at Taxes, Stupidity and Death.

UPDATE (Nice Deb):

Thanks, Biw, I was away this weekend, and I’m just now getting caught up.

Over at Big Government and Ace of Spades HQ, special attention has been paid to the weaselly last words of Krugman’s column:

“I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.”

Larry O’Conner says:

If by “obvious reasons” he actually means “Because even the left-leaning readers of the New York Times will find this post inappropriate and tasteless and I can’t handle the shit-storm that will inevitably hit this page if I allow comments,” then yes, we understand. But here at Big Journalism we have no such concern.

Ace:

If al-Krugman won’t open his comments, why, I guess we should just open ours. Let ‘er rip, morons.

My own feelings:

The hard left will forever be enraged that 9/11 happened during a Republican’s watch, and they will never forgive the Republicans who were in charge because they showed strength and character when it was needed most. They deeply resent the fact that Republicans benefited politically from 9/11 because they see everything as an opportunity to politically game events to their advantage. Everything is about power with these people. Everything.

The hurt  feelings of these disgruntled vermin persist to this day, which is why some of them loathe  the idea of memorializing 9/11.

Linked by Michelle Malkin in Buzzworthy,  and Doug Ross in Larwyn’s links, thanks!

Rigid, Inflexible Ideologue Pushes Us Closer To Financialgeddon!

We been hearing a lot about inflexible ideologues holding us hostage over this debt ceiling “crisis”, and how childish they are, and how they are terrorists who are taking hostages as part of this process.

Yesterday, they struck again.

It really is amazing just how small of stature some people are.  It must be difficult in among the shadows who are leading from behind with a plan that they dare not clearly present for fear of rejection, and it must be even harder for poor little Harry.  Am I the only one who thinks that without the shoes he clearly has trouble filling, no one would give him another thought five minutes after he speaks?