Fear an Iarthair

"Secret" Kata and The Problem of Preservation

2011-12-24T12:09:00.000-08:00

Every so often, when writing about RyuTe, I feel obligated to point out that I do not speak from a position of authority. I'm just a student. Take my opinions for what they're worth.

I've been writing a bit lately (here and here) if you're interested, musing on the future of the RyuTe Renmei. I actually got some comments on one of those posts (this is as rare as a meteor striking, given the microscopic readership of this blog), and one of them, from Sensei Strange, got me to thinking. In it, he mentioned that he wasn't into "secret kata" and some kinds of martial-arts politics. And I understand, understand completely, but I couldn't help but think that he might not completely understand the problem.

(Okay, a very small handful of people--probably less than three--are wondering, "What 'secret kata'?" The kata in question is--I see no harm in saying it, you will find out soon enough if you persist in poking around the internet--Shi Ho Happo No Te--and it was, if I understand what I've been told correctly----it was intended for the people in Shin Shu Ho. If you want to know more about Shin Shu Ho, I'd suggest starting with the material here .)

Maybe to really understand the problem--and maybe I don't, maybe I'm getting it all wrong, this is just how it seems to me--a person needs some background information. The first bit of information, and vital information it is, is that the odds are excellent that despite what may be years of experience in and with various karate schools and organizations, you haven't seen "karate" the way it was practiced in the middle of the nineteenth century. I don't mean that the uniforms have changed, or that style names have originated/changed. I mean that through accident and choice, huge amounts of information have been lost to most karate organizations, even down to some basic techniques, and that furthermore, most of the people in those organizations don't even realize it has been lost.

I almost hate telling people this. No one wants to believe it. The Shotokan people have invested a huge amount of effort into convincing themselves that Shotokan is the zenith of martial arts, as have a lot of the Taekwon-do people--so help me, I have actually seen TKD schools promote themselves as teachers of "Super Karate"--half or more of the Goju Ryu people really do seem to think that Yamaguchi Gogen's dedicated practice of Goju Ryu really did give him almost supernatural powers, the Isshin Ryu folks really do seem to think that the reason their system doesn't contain any given technique is that it must have been discarded by Shimabuku as a "fancy" technique, and so on. The grapplers--the judoka, the BJJ folks--often seem like they want to believe that karate is useless at close quarters. The aiki folks and the Chinese internal arts folks seem to have a lot of mental energy invested in convincing themselves that their more sophisticated arts have that simple block-punch-kick stuff beat all hollow.

You tell these people that they they're not really in a position to evaluate karate, either positively or negatively, because they likely haven't even seen the real thing, you are bound to get some interesting reactions, because for more than a few folks, part of their self-image is wrapped up in the their belief that they are practicing a superior martial art.

This is in spite of some very prominent people--or at least one--coming right out and telling us that "karate" as most people know it today and "karate" as it was practiced 160 years ago are two very different things. I recall reading Funakoshi Gichin's autobiography and highlighting a couple of very significant passages. I'd quote them for you verbatim, but I can't seem to locate my copy just this minute. However, if you have a copy, a little searching will verify what I am telling you: Funakoshi said quite clearly that the karate they were practicing "today"--that would have been the 1950s--was a "far cry" from the karate he learned growing up on Okinawa (that would have been the 1870s-1880s). He further said that he had deliberately "simplified" the kata so as to make it easier to teach large numbers of students.

I wonder how many people have asked themselves what it means to "simplify" a kata. If you look around at various versions of Naihanchi Shodan, you can see quite a bit of variation, but just as far as the physical movements are concerned, I don't know if any of them are obviously simpler than the others. Oh, sure, there are details here, and details there, but mostly,
Naihanchi Shodan is recognizably the same kata from system to system. Look, in particular, at the Shotokan version and ask yourself if, going by looks alone, you would consider it "simplified."

So, if by "simplification," Funakoshi wasn't necessarily referring just to the physical movements of the kata, what was he referring to? I suggest to you that he meant he was dropping the instruction of a large body of knowledge associated with given kata, variations on kata movements, the practice of a great many techniques contained or implied in those kata, that he was sticking to simple, surface-level interpretations. I suggest to you that even if he had been inclined to teach the mainland Japanese everything he knew about each kata, he simply didn't have time.

Another couple of books I wish everyone would read are Nagamine Shoshin's The Essence of Karate-Do and Arakaki Kiyoshi's The Secrets of Okinawan Karate, if only to drive home this fact: the two books teach completely different methods of punching. Why is that significant? Because Arakaki learned how to punch from Nagamine. What Nagamine put in his book is exactly what Arakaki says is the wrong way to punch. You can draw whatever conclusions you like. I suspect that Nagamine wasn't entirely comfortable with everyone knowing how to punch like he
taught Arakaki to punch. Whatever the reason, here is what Nagamine writes, emphasis mine:

Seiken is formed by bending the fingers at the second joints, clenching them tightly into the palm, and pressing both the forefinger and the middle finger with the thumb...

Arakaki tells you bluntly that this is wrong, emphasis again mine:

This usage of wrist and fingers has only been passed down by oral tradition. Thus, this core concept has been lost even in Okinawa.

[snip]

...you must not tighten up any part of your body, especially the arm and hand. You never make a tight fist to hit a target.

[snip]

Only a few Okinawan karate practitioners still know about this.

Arakaki then goes on to say:

When those karate practitioners who understood and performed the essence of karate as a martial art began to migrate from Okinawa to Japan and introduce karate, there were not enough of them to teach properly.

[snip]

As a result...the essence of the original was lost.

I do not quote Arakaki because I think everything in his book is gospel; I quote him because he and Nagamine, together, make it glaringly obvious that information critical to even basic techiques has been lost to modern karate.

I could go on, indeed, am tempted to go on, but I think I've made my point clear: there is a very good chance that you haven't seen old-time karate. I don't care if you got your third dan directly under Yamaguchi Gogen, like as not, you haven't seen it. I am not trying to be offensive. I know that there are people who have spent their entire adult lives consumed with the study of Japanese Goju Ryu, with Shotokan, with Shito Ryu, with Taekwon-do, etc., and they are very, very good at what they do, and it is not useless stuff by any means. I would never say such a thing. I am just saying that, formidable as a Shotokan godan might be, he is not practicing old-time karate. By Funakoshi's own admission, he is not practicing old-time karate. Accept Funakoshi's opinion, if you won't accept mine.

But Taika Oyata is practicing old-time karate. His story is told in multiple places around the internet, including on the association website, and you can hunt for it there if you want to read it, but the upshot is that Taika Seiyu Oyata is an enormously important link to the karate of the old days, perhaps, maybe, quite possibly, the most knowledgeable man on the planet as regards the way the Okinawan bushi actually practiced their arts.

And if I understood what he wrote in Ryu-Te no Michi correctly, he thinks of the true, genuine Okinawan karate as a gift of God, given to mankind through the agency of the Okinawan people.

And that presents a problem to someone in Taika's situation: HOW? How do you preserve this precious body of knowledge? How do you successfully pass it on to future generations of mankind? It almost died out once. Who is to say that it won't die out in the future?

Obviously, you must teach. But who? And what? People of Taika's giftedness are few and far between, and even when you find them, you also find that they have careers and families that they must take into account. Can you teach each of them everything? Is there enough time?

I haven't asked Taika or anyone else about this. It is pure speculation on my part. But I would suggest to you that at least in part, the RyuTe Renmei and Oyata Shin Shu Ho are Taika's attempt to solve this problem. I would suggest to you that he is attempting to preserve this body of knowledge in a group of people, some of whom (Shin Shu Ho) he has had an opportunity to examine quite closely and whom he needs to be able to count on to pass on this knowledge correctly, without adding their own biases and prejudices.

The more you think about this, the more a "secret" kata starts to make sense. If that kata was to be the vehicle through which you planned on revealing your most advanced material to your most reliable students, it would be necessary to first make sure that they were all performing the movements correctly. If those people were scattered across a fair amount of geography, this alone might take a few years. Making sure that everyone had a thorough understanding of the principles behind the kata might take a few years more. Helping your students extract techniques from the kata might take a few years more. Helping them to then see how the principles of the "secret" kata could be traced through other kata, perhaps, might take yet a few years more. During all this time, it would be necessary to prohibit them from attempting to teach a kata they did not yet fully understand to others, lest what you were trying to impart be corrupted in the process.

And if, in the middle of this years-long process, some of your trusted students started teaching this kata to others, without your permission, before the group had even thoroughly understood it, let alone mastered it, what would it do to your overall objective of passing on that body of knowledge which you believe to be a gift of God? How would you have to deal with the errant students? In my opinion, your options would be limited--and "politics" would likely be the bogeyman on which any subsequent events might be blamed.

Again, I haven't asked anyone about this. I do not speak for Taika Oyata or the RyuTe Renmei and this is all speculation on my part. But I believe if you examine the problem this way, some of the "politics" start to make a little more sense, as does the idea of a "secret" kata.

Just my opinion, worth about what you paid for it.

Fragmentation and Preservation Part Deux

2011-12-18T10:15:00.000-08:00

It wasn't very long ago that I mused about the future of the RyuTe Renmei. Rather than recap it here, I'd suggest you just go and scan the other post, if you're interested. At any rate, I was perusing YouTube the other day--as you might imagine, every so often, I search YouTube for--oh, what do I search it for?

RyuTe
Ryu Te
Ryukyu Kempo
Kyusho
Kyusho-Jutsu
Tuite
Toide
Tuidi
Ti
Te
Di

and (ahem!)

Stevie Nicks

Hey, what can I say? Big fan. Still my favorite songwriter.

At any rate, I saw a video, a new one, from a group I hadn't heard of before. Oh, I had heard of the principals: former students of Taika Seiyu Oyata, fairly high-ranking ones, they were, before they left. God knows they're better than I'll ever be. But for whatever reasons (and I'll leave you to speculate), they are no longer part of the RyuTe Renmei and they have apparently formed their own association. If there's anything that really grabbed my attention, it's that on this video, someone was clearly performing a particular kata that--ahem!--not very many people are supposed to know. I have seen only a couple of bits and pieces of it myself. That, I thought, takes cheek. At least they didn't show the whole thing, just a substantial part of it, but you can bet your bottom dollar that won't last.

They are not the only ones. There is, as far as I can tell, at least one other association headed by one of Taika's former students. It seems to have a fairly good-ish number of member clubs and I have seen several videos associated with the group. And there are other schools, I think, whose chief instructors used to have some association with Taika Oyata.

All of them, as I noted in the previous post, are teaching "Ryukyu Kempo," or "Ryukyuan martial arts," or something like that. Nothing wrong with that, those are perfectly generic terms. And, as noted in the previous post, even if what they're teaching isn't exactly what Taika is teaching now, the content they're giving their students is still a long way ahead of what you are going to get in your average taekwon-do or karate class. Some of their students look, I must say, pretty good.

And that got me to thinking. You see, RyuTe, despite being very well known in certain circles, isn't exactly what I'd call common. Oh, it's not that you can't find instruction. There are several places/people in Missouri, some in Texas, one successful school in New York, and so on. But most of the clubs are, I think, fairly small and spread fairly far apart. In Oklahoma, for example, as far as I know, there are two kyoshi-level instructors (my own and a gentleman in Edmond) and a handful--a very small handful--of other yudansha, some of which are no longer active and none of which, as far as I know, are teaching.

So let me riddle you this:

Let's suppose--just suppose, mind you--that you have seen video of RyuTe on YouTube and visited the RyuTe website, and you are interested, but are two hours away from Edmond and four away from Tulsa. Let us further suppose that by sheer dumb luck, a yudansha from one of the aforementioned "ryukyu kempo" associations moves into town and starts teaching at a local community center.

Are you telling me you're not going to go study with that guy because he's not with the RyuTe Renmei? Because you're not sure his instructor left Taika Oyata under perfect circumstances?

I'm thinkin' you're gonna go study with that guy, because he's all you've got.

At any rate, now, to my mind, this creates a situation and I wonder how many people have thought about it. As I mentioned above, at least one of these "ryukyu kempo" associations seems to have a fair number of clubs under its umbrella. I'm thinking that most likely, most of the students involved had nothing to do with whatever reasons their instructors are no longer affiliated with Taika Oyata.

How do you handle it when one of those students moves into your town and wants to start training with your RyuTe club?

Another question: as I noted in the previous post, it seems that in the RyuTe Renmei, not everyone knows all the weapons. Some know the jo, some the nunchaku, some the sai, some all three of those, some bo, some tanbo, some tonfa, and so forth. As far as I know, no one in the RyuTe Renmei has ever put the weapons kata on video--except that Tashi Logue had the jo kihon kata on Facebook for a week or so, and one person put Sakugawa no jo on YouTube. There are a handful of the kihon katas out there in cyberspace, but they were not put out there, as far as I know, by current RyuTe Renmei practitioners. At any rate, there is a dearth of video material on the weapons. Nothing like the series of tapes Taika did for the empty-hand kata exists for the weapons kata. So, what if--

Okay, let's say you're in the RyuTe Renmei, and the only two weapons your instructor is familiar with are the bo and the sai. Of course, you learn those from him, but you want to learn kama, too.

And someone from one of the "ryukyu kempo" associations comes out with an instructional video on the kama. Multiple views of the kata, applications, everything (mind you, this hasn't happened yet, as far as I know, but face it--it will).

Do you order a copy?

Just wonderin'. I'm thinking that this situation has all the ingredients for a really interesting couple of decades.

Has It Come to This?

2011-12-17T09:58:00.000-08:00

By now you've seen it: a video gone viral, "The Most Vicious Taekwon-Do Fight Ever."

All I could think when I saw it is that this is why people don't think that karate works.

Shoot, when I was training in TKD those many years ago and made it almost all the way to black belt, it wasn't worth much, but dadgummit, I did at least get to where I could hit pretty hard and mostly avoid being hit. I did successfully defend myself a few times. Now, it's a laugher for adults.

Nobody's ever going to think of Taekwon-do again without laughing, and it's the people that just had to make a sport out of it that let it happen.

Congratulations, guys, you've destroyed your art.

Death Rattle of a Church

2011-12-11T12:42:00.001-08:00

I got something of a surprise in the mail the other day. It was a letter from the pastor and a "commitment card," something the church leadership is hoping the membership will fill out and return shortly so they can plan financing for next year.

I am not trying to be negative. There is nothing unbiblical about it, that is, there's no prohibition of such things in scripture. On the other hand, there's no example of it in scripture, either.

I see it as a very bad sign, the death rattle, really, of a church that will soon either change drastically or cease to exist. I write about it only because I guarantee you that unless you live in a demographically-blessed part of the country, there are churches around you--Southern Baptist churches, anyway--in very similar shape.

You see, this church was once packed to the gills, but over the years, the city grew, the 'burbs got farther away, and now, pretty much the only people left are older people who still live in the area (and are, obviously, much closer to dying off) and a few people buying "starter homes" in the area, and the children of the older folks who, for some reason, are still going to this church in spite of the fact that they live much closer to some other church.

You'll say, if you're a typical Southern Baptist, "Evangelize!" and I would agree, except that "evangelism" as the SBC has been doing it for decades MOSTLY hasn't worked. The Fall Festivals produce few visitors (after Hallowe'en), same with the Christmas musicals, the Easter services, and so forth, and ALL of these are touted as "outreach" tools. All touted as outreach tools, but they have, decade after decade, either not been successful at all or only marginally.

"Visitation!" you will cry next, and I would agree, except that "I've been there and done that," as they say, and you will not like to hear this, but in my opinion, you are most likely doing it wrong. You see, most churches, if they HAVE a visitation program (one for outreach/evangelism as opposed to visiting shut-ins) INSIST on visiting lapsed members first, then people who have visited the church (often as the result of a Fall Festival or Christmas musical or Easter service...), and then, and ONLY then, will they knock on strangers' doors. Actually, forget that. They never knock on strangers' doors.

Not a lick of this does any good. They are either ignoring or have never realized a fundamental truth. You won't believe me at first, but ask your church buddies, one at a time, and see what they tell you.

That fundamental truth is that most people are not brought to Christ by a revival, or a Billy Graham or Franklin Graham crusade, or an "outreach event," or a visit after they've been out of church for six years, or even evangelistic tracts. Oh, sure, you will find some. You cannot sow a thousand seeds without producing an occasional turnip. But MOST people, friends, MOST people who are brought to Christ are brought to Christ through the testimony and influence of someone they know, a friend or a relative.

Ask around. It is the truth. Receive it and believe it.

What does that have to do with a local church dying? Just this: most people, if they could, prefer to go to a church in their area--about three miles or less from their home, actually. Which means that if a church is to grow, or at least avoid death, and most people in the church hear about Christ from friends or relatives, the people in that church HAVE TO KNOW PEOPLE WITHIN ABOUT THREE MILES OF THE CHURCH. If they don't, the church will slowly die off.

This is exactly what is happening in our church. It is amazing to watch, for no one seems to "get it." We have a Hispanic congregation that meets in our building. I know some of the members fairly well. Their congregation has doubled or more in the last six months. I asked one of them this morning, "Where do most of your people live? Within three miles or so of here?" He thought about it and then answered in the affirmative.

That, friends, is it. As the neighborhood ages, as the Anglos move out into the 'burbs or die, the Hispanic immigrants are moving in. We don't know them, but the members of the Hispanic church do. The results are predictable. We are dying, they are growing.

And as long as we are dying, friends, church revenues are going to go down, even when or if the economy recovers. There is nothing you can do about that. "Commitment cards" simply do not address the problem. Their very existence demonstrates that people either do not know what the problem is or are unwilling to face up to the problem. That is why I termed it the "death rattle" of the church.

The problem is lack of people. That always leads to lack of money. It is very simple. Church giving, on average, is always about three percent, despite much very misleading preaching on the "tenth," or "tithe." ("Tithe" does mean "tenth." It is not a synonym for "regular gift.") This is consistently true. The answer to church financing, in practical terms, is never to get the members to give more. History demonstrates that this never lasts (even if it gets started). The answer is to have more people--and in our case, that means, if we are smart, merging with the Hispanic church.

'Cause if we don't, you can bet your bottom dollar that in less than ten years, what's left of our congregation will be selling them our building.

Just my two cents. A one-draft diagnosis and glimpse into the future. No offense intended, just bluntness.

Takamura Naihanchi

2011-12-08T17:59:00.000-08:00

A version of Naihanchi Shodan I haven't seen before. Stumbled on it whilst perusing the newest addition to the blogroll, Sipping Ti.

This interests me. I might work with a couple of these moves and see what I come up with.

Fragmentation and Preservation

2011-11-27T11:22:00.000-08:00

Only a few short days ago, Tashi Jim Logue, Taika Seiyu Oyata's senior student, passed from this world. It came as something of a surprise. I knew he'd had cancer. I knew he made trips every so often to a cancer-treatment facility (all of which I assumed were to verify that he was still cancer-free). I knew he'd been in the hospital recently. I did not know, and possibly others did not know, that his death from cancer was so imminent.

The whole thing put me in mind of something that I've thought about from time to time: what will happen to Taika Oyata's karate when the inevitable happens and he, too, passes from this world? It is true that Okinawans are the longest-lived people on the planet, on average, and it is true that Taika Oyata's father lived to a very old age, and it is true that Taika Oyata may well live another twenty years. And yet it is also true that he cannot live forever, and eventually, his organization, the RyuTe Renmei, will be headed by someone else. I am sure that that person will be someone of knowledge and integrity. Every person within the RyuTe Renmei with whom I've talked or corresponded has been very dedicated to Taika and his system. They have all been classy people. I have not met any exceptions.

And yet the good folks in the RyuTe Renmei are not the only people Taika has taught. There are a number of people who have studied under Taika and who are no longer with his organization for one reason or another. Do not ask me why. I know none of them and cannot even begin to speculate on why they left or were shown the door. But there are a number of them, some of whom were promoted to fairly high rank before they left. Now, it is true that the art as Taika has taught it has changed somewhat over the years. My own teacher thinks that this is because Taika is still analyzing the art, as he was taught to do by his teachers, still splitting pages within the book, as my teacher might put it, and also because Taika has revealed more of the art as his students have demonstrated themselves capable of understanding and handling it. This should not surprise anyone who has seen a person learn--well, anything, even simple cooking. It is pointless to try to teach a person how to make puff pastry if he has not yet demonstrated the ability to make egg noodles. So it is true that a person who left Taika's organization years ago, despite having attained high rank, would not be teaching exactly the same thing that is being taught in the RyuTe Renmei right now.

And yet, nevertheless, regardless of the circumstances under which they left, and regardless of how long ago they left, each of these people can legitimately claim to have been taught by Taika Oyata and to have been promoted to high rank. And that is nothing to sneeze at! I well remember having first been introduced to what was then called Ryukyu Kempo, back in the eighties (I trained for a while, then dropped out for many years, in case you were wondering. I have not been training continuously since the eighties!). I had been training in Taekwon-do for some little time; my next promotion would have been to black belt. I had trained under two seventh-dans, one sixth-dan, and two third-dans. Not one of those people showed me material as advanced as what my teacher showed me then. Not ONE. Not even close. Nor have I seen the like amongst the local Japanese Goju Ryu crowd (though I have much respect for them and their organization and follow them closely online). In other words, a person might have left Taika's organization fifteen years ago and "missed out" on some of the information he's revealed over the last several years, and he would still, in my opinion, be teaching material vastly better than most people in most "karate" classes around the country are getting.

And that is where I start remembering Yip Man. You may not know about him (I'm sure many do!). He was a very famous kung fu teacher in Hong Kong, a remarkable fellow who'd learned Wing Chun back on mainland China before managing to escape to Hong Kong. Yip Man's kung fu was widely known to be extremely street-effective. He taught a number of people over the years, and last I heard, I believe that there were a minimum of three people claiming to have been his "closed-door" disciple, the only inheritor of the true art of Wing Chun kung fu! And the thing is, each of these people is apparently good enough that you might well believe their claims!

I'm sure there are other cases like this. As a matter of fact, I know there are. Look at the history of the Yagyu Shinkage Ryu in Japan. Apparently, that system didn't survive intact past the death of its founder. If I understand correctly, one of the founder's sons went on to teach the Shogun's family, and another stayed behind in the family village, with the one son eventually deciding that the other son had changed some elements of their father's system, and founding his own sub-system, the Owari Yagyu Shinkage Ryu (Don't quote me on this, I may have the details wrong!). And it went downhill from there!

Look at the history of aikido since Ueshiba Morihei's death.

Come to think of it, since there is a sizeable Japanese Goju Ryu crowd 'round here, look at Goju Ryu! How many different sorts of Goju Ryu can you name? Off the top of my head, there is Goju Ryu as taught by the Jundokan, by Morio Higaonna, Seikichi Toguchi, Peter Urban's Goju USA, Lou Angel's Tenshi Goju, "Chinese" Goju, Gogen Yamaguchi's Goju-Kai, and who knows what else!

History and human nature being what they are, then, I find myself wondering how many of Taika's former students will someday be claiming to have been shown the real, true art of karate, of Ryukyu Kempo, to have been Taika's secret disciple. Will any of them have the cheek to claim that that they have it right and the RyuTe Renmei has it wrong? It sounds absurd, but--again, human nature being what it is--I would bet you dollars to donuts that that is exactly what happens.

I'd love to be able to say that I know how to prevent this, but I haven't a clue. And it will be a darn shame when it happens.

Tashi Logue's death also put me in mind of the vital necessity of teaching what you know whilst you have the chance. You never know just how much time you have. Tashi Logue certainly set the example in this case. He worked hard to share his knowledge.

The reality is that each of these systems--I am talking about the older, more classical martial systems--is, at any given time, but one generation away from extinction (the same has often been noted of Christianity, by the way). It is not possible to learn it all from a book or video and there are never enough people practicing them. They are not the same as systems like Taekwon-do or Shotokan or Japanese Goju Ryu or Aikido or Judo or Kendo, which have millions of practitioners throughout the world. I would not be at all surprised to find that there are fewer than five thousand RyuTe students worldwide. The majority of those, of course, are not yet qualified to be teachers. While I do not know, have never tried to make a count, it would not at all surprise me if the depressing reality is that there are really very few members of the Renmei ranked fourth dan or above. Or perhaps there is a high percentage of people ranked at that level, but a high percentage of a small number is still a small number.

This is very sad in a way, yet it is also completely amazing that there is a RyuTe Renmei at all. You can put it down to divine providence or sheer dumb luck as you prefer, but if I understand what I've read and been told correctly, the content Taika Oyata learned from his first two teachers might well have perished with them had he not encountered them. I have certainly not seen anything quite like what my own teacher has shown me anywhere else. That is significant. Over the decades, I have acquired what has to be, I think, as solid a martial-arts library as can be had in English. I have works on aikido, on jujutsu, on judo, on karate, on pressure points, acupuncture, and chin na. I have watched way too many hours of video online. And I am serious, as serious as a heart attack, when I say that what Taika Oyata has revealed, as passed on to me by my own teacher, is different. Not that you can't find similar techniques in those other martial arts. More than once my teacher has said things like, "This is how they do it in aikido. We just do this little (fill in the blank) to (fill in the blank)." There are techniques that look a lot like what we do in RyuTe, but in RyuTe there is always something, something that changes the results of the technique from the "oh-crap-that-hurts" or the "oh-crap-where-did-my-balance-go?" elicited by other systems to the "OHCRAPWHERETHE****DIDTHATCOMEFROM?" that you get with RyuTe. It is just not like anything else, and it was almost lost. As my own teacher has told me repeatedly, Taika's teachers were not, per se, teachers, they were upper-class fighting men, nobles. As far as I can tell from what I've read and been told, Taika Oyata was not simply their premier student, he was their only student, and had he not been there at the right time, huge chunks of the real Okinawan martial traditions would simply have vanished, lost to time. More, the world would not have even known it! The world would have gone right on assuming that what they were being shown in the dojo of modern karate systems was all that there was (as a matter of fact, I have read some fairly amusing stuff fairly obviously premised on the idea that modern karate is all that there is--that is, there are still a pretty fair number of people who simply will not admit to themselves that there is more to the kata or to vital point striking or to karate's grappling than Funakoshi revealed in Karate-Do Kyohan.)

But because Taika Oyata was there, and because he, in turn, has been willing to teach, those centuries-old skills are largely in the hands of middle-class Americans. I sometimes wonder if people fully appreciate what a huge leap he has made in choosing to entrust us with this art. I hope that we do not fail him--and in a larger sense, our neighbors--by failing to pass it on. I think he has certainly done everything humanly possible to make sure that the knowledge is not altogether lost, even if no one else of his capabilities arises for a long time to come. I hope also that everyone realizes that preserving that body of knowledge is going to have to be something of a team effort--have to be, I say, and I am quite sure I am not the first person to have thought along these lines! You see, as far as I know, the weapons knowledge--nunchaku, sai, bo, jo, and so forth--is split up, kind of as though there are, shall we say, "subject matter experts." My own teacher knows the jo very well, and also can teach sai--but although he has nunchaku and tanbo in the weapons racks, he does not know the kata for those weapons and wouldn't venture teaching more than the most basic movements. I am given to understand that this situation is not uncommon--that there are people that know nunchaku pretty well, but not chizikunbo, or vice versa, and so on.

This body of martial knowledge doesn't reside in one man--other than Taika Oyata--but in a body of men, in the RyuTe Renmei and especially in Shin Shu Ho. Part of me wonders if Taika Oyata didn't set it up that way deliberately, so that they would have to stay united.

I won't be in a position to teach much of anything for another couple of years. At that time, I hope to begin teaching on a modest scale, under my own teacher's direction. I particularly hope to spread RyuTe amongst the local homeschooling community. They--homeschoolers and RyuTe--seem natural fits for one another. And I hope that in a modest way, I can thereby contribute to keeping this system alive amongst people who truly need it. And I hope that when the inevitable occurs, I hope that it can be said of me that I played my part in keeping this knowledge available for others.

Bad News

2011-11-15T17:52:00.000-08:00

I just heard via e-mail from my teacher that Jim Logue, Taika Seiyu Oyata's senior student, just passed away from cancer.

Very bad news. I have the impression that he was a Christian man, though I don't recall where I heard it. He will be missed, and severely.

More Thoughts on Taekwon-do, RyuTe, Ed Parker, American Kenpo an' Stuff

2011-10-20T03:43:00.000-07:00

Beware: this post rambles. You have been warned.

I suppose, for the sake of people not familiar with this blog--that would be the overwhelming majority of people in the world--people that are just "driving by," so to speak, maybe looking for information on American Kenpo, I ought to briefly recap my experience in martial arts, just so you'll have an idea of where I'm coming from.

I first started martial arts with a class at age of fourteen, something called "Polynesian-Chinese Karate." I knew nothing at the time, had absolutely no idea that this was an offspring of Hawaii's melting pot of martial arts (from what I understand, it's more or less a meld of kenpo and Hawaiian lua, if you wanted to know). It didn't matter that I knew nothing. I was only there for a couple of classes, and the only memory I have is of a sparring session, wherein the other kid complained to the instructor, "He hits hard!"

Then I wound up in a local taekwon-do school, I suppose you could say by default. You see, although Japanese Goju-Ryu was huge in Northeastern Oklahoma at the time, and by huge, I mean it had been pretty much the only game in town for quite a while--OK, you're wondering: Lou Angel brought it to town, having learned it under Peter Urban. Lou later traveled to Japan and studied directly under Gogen Yamaguchi, and was awarded higher dan ranks whilst he was there. Lou taught in Tulsa for quite a while, promoted a pretty fair number of black belts, a number of whom still teach--or their students teach--around the area today. Some of these guys were fairly well known back in the day, like Billy Briscoe, widely reputed as having "the fastest hands in the West."

Another guy that came up in Lou's organization was Gary Boyd, who was my teacher's first teacher. Gary was a special case. According to my teacher, he never tested for black belt. It seems that Gary's job afforded him the opportunity for considerable travel, and it was his custom to visit dojos wherever he went and ask to train. He collected kata, and he loved free-sparring (at which he must have been, given the stuff I've seen from my own teacher, darn near brilliant). At any rate, as a brown belt, he wound up in Gosei Yamaguchi's dojo--yes, Gogen Yamaguchi's son--and beat all the black belts present in free sparring, whereupon Yamaguchi Sensei handed him a black belt, saying, "Nobody beats my black belts but a black belt, so here--you're a black belt!"

Some story, eh? You would think it inevitable that a would-be karate student in Oklahoma would wind up in Goju-Ryu, but as it happens, shortly before I started training in martial arts, the Goju community in Northeast Oklahoma was absolutely rocked by a series of events that led to Lou Angel leaving the state, never, as far as I know, to return. I have heard the story and will not go into it. Others who know it better can tell it on their blogs if they feel so inclined.

I knew nothing of what was going on, but I did know, and so did my mom (she was a single parent at the time), that the hot place to go for karate training in Tulsa at the time was a school run by a Korean immigrant who later touted himself as one of the world's top taekwon-do "coaches"--and he did indeed coach at least one competitor who, if I recall correctly, medalled in the Olympics. He was also the first teacher of a man who later achieved world-wide fame in the kickboxing ring (I am not exaggerating--world-wide fame) and several other people who did quite well over about a four-state area in tournament fighting competitions.

Taekwon-do as it was taught then, and as taught by this man, was different from much of what I have seen from taekwon-do people over the last fifteen years or so. Most of what I have seen over the last fifteen years or so has been nothing but beat-crap-out-of-each-other-with-wildly-unrealistic-for-the-street-kicks stuff, so completely removed from its karate roots (Okay, I know some taekwon-do guy out there is climbing out of his skin at that comment, so let me digress: No, taekwon-do is not the modern-day version of a centuries-old Korean warrior art. It is the result of a fusion between Japanese karate and some indigenous Korean kicks. Live with it.) as to be completely unrecognizable. Taekwon-do back then was (and still is, in some organizations) very hard to distinguish from Shotokan karate. Even the forms--kata, hyung, poomse, whatever you want to call them--were just modifications of the Shotokan kata.

I got up to blue belt--the rank just below brown--with this man, and if nothing else, I learned how to hit pretty darn hard and improved my coordination, which, at the commencement of my training was absolute crap, quite a bit. Then, for reasons I just honestly don't recall in detail, I dropped out. I started and stopped a couple of times over the next few years, spending time with one of my first TKD teacher's students, then with the karate club at the university I was attending (where I made it to brown belt) and then with a gentleman from Korea who also ran a donut shop. I was working at Arby's at the time, and couldn't afford diddly, so I managed a special deal with this guy. When I wasn't working, during the daylight hours, I would just come and sit and answer the phone. In return--free lessons!

The school wasn't very old. I soon made it to first gup (ikkyu in Japanese) and I was the senior student. And it was just about that time that I really began to understand that something wasn't quite right with taekwon-do.

There I was, within spitting distance of getting my black belt, and one day, when my instructor and I were alone, I was sparring with him, and I suddenly realized that I was manhandling him--that he might outpoint me, but if I really chose to press it, it would have been him getting hurt, not me. Now, it is true that I was no midget (about five-ten and about 180 pounds at the time) and he was a little Korean guy, but he was a sixth-degree black belt and I couldn't help but think that if, not even being a black belt, I could "handle" a sixth-degree black belt, then maybe taekwon-do was never going to be, for me, the ferocious fighting art that I had always heard that karate was. You see, I had had my suspicions for a long time. I had read Richard Kim's book, Funakoshi's autobiography, and several other books, and I knew that karate was supposed to be bad, that genuine experts were supposed to be able to achieve remarkable effects, but the reality is that I had never seen any such things and had been training and waiting a long time so as to reach a skill level where karate's "badness," if you will, would show up.

It's not that I believed taekwon-do was useless, mind you. I had used it--simple reverse punches to the solar plexus--several times to put a stop to attempted bullying in high school. I was quite capable of manhandling the other students in my instructor's school. And I had this abiding conviction that there was something there, for I found it impossible to believe that people would preserve kata for so very long if there was nothing to them. I had heard the instructions about "chambers" and "blocks," and, knowing no better, accepted them, but with a grain of salt.

I mean, some of that stuff was just impossible to believe. You're going to "chamber" for a block on the right side of your body by first withdrawing both hands to the left side? Seriously? But I didn't believe the old masters were stupid, either.

I knew there had to be more.

Well, eventually, I quit Arby's and joined the Marine Corps Reserve. During our last week in boot camp, we were allowed to visit the PX, and on the cover of BLACK BELT magazine, which I bought, was a man named Seiyu Oyata. The article was about the hidden meanings of kata, and you can imagine that I was interested. At last, here was someone saying that my suspicions were right--the kata motions weren't useless, but they weren't what I had been taught, either.

You could have knocked me over with a feather when I got back home and, through sheer dumb luck, found that someone was actually teaching Taika Oyata's system (known then as "Ryukyu Kempo," now as "RyuTe") in my city. This was amazing. I joined the class and was there regularly for some few months, happy as a clam.

Then I got married, and, as those of you who are married know, things get complicated. I dropped out of the class and didn't return for a long time. So long, in fact, that I had an almost-grown son. Life had grown somewhat more manageable, and he had an interest, and at first I thought, "Well, we'll take a look at the Shotokan class at First Baptist, it's probably the best we can do, we'll order some of Taika Oyata's tapes and see if we can't apply some of what we see to what we do in Shotokan." But then I thought, "Well, who knows? Maybe my old teacher is still teaching."

At first I couldn't find him. He certainly wasn't teaching publicly. I finally found a stray blogospheric reference to him, and then--duh!--decided to look him up in the phone book. He had since become a very sick man, but he remembered me, and after talking with me and my son, agreed to take us on as private students in his home. We have been with him now for some little time, and it has been amazing. He's about to turn 63, and is an oxygen patient, not very big, not strong at all, and he can make the techniques work on me and my son. He is living proof that real Okinawan karate works, that it's skill and knowledge that rule, not size and strength. He validates everything he says by his ability to make the techniques work on healthier, younger, larger, stronger people.

So, there I am. Not as "brief" as I initially intended it to be, but I warned you that the post rambled!

Now, about American Kenpo. Obviously I do not practice the system and am never likely to, but it has intrigued me for a while, as have other "American" martial arts, like Danzan-Ryu jujutsu, Budoshin jujutsu, Small-Circle jujutsu, Vee-jitsu, Kombido, Kajukenbo, and so forth. I mean, I can see how these things arise...

...pardon me while I digress for a moment. I have to tell a story about a local kenpo teacher, one I heard from my own teacher.

You'll recall that I said Japanese Goju-Ryu was once the game in town around here, only to lose first place to taekwon-do. However, there was a kenpo school here for a while, a franchised one, and the teacher was a man of considerable ability who remains quite well known around these parts, although, as far as I know, his teaching is limited to a handful of students in the Tahlequah area.

My teacher told me that this man once attended the local state fair and got drunk whilst he was there. The local sheriff's department was providing security and made their intentions to take him in known, and he said fine; he wasn't going to resist, he would go with them, but not to touch him--he couldn't stand to be touched. Now, I know that makes no sense at all, but you have to bear in mind that the man was drunk. Well, the deputies had already put out a call for backup, for the man was known to them, and as deputy number four arrived on the scene, overhearing the conversation, it climaxed with deputies one, two, and three trying to take the kenpo teacher down from behind in order to cuff him. In a trice, the kenpo teacher had downed all three deputies and turned to the fourth one, who, not being a fool, announced that he wouldn't touch the kenpo teacher, just, please, sir, would you take these and cuff yourself?

In court, the first three deputies naturally wanted the kenpo teacher to serve time for resisting arrest, battery, and so forth, but when deputy number four took the stand, he confirmed everything the kenpo teacher had said and the judge tossed those charges, apparently on the grounds that deputies one, two, and three were idiots! The kenpo teacher was found guilty of being drunk and disorderly and that, apparently, was it.

My teacher had a job in city government at the time and deputy number four, in addition to his duties as a deputy, was one of my teacher's employees, and that is how he heard the story. Hope you enjoyed it.

As I was saying, I can see how these things arise, especially given my experience with taekwon-do. I mean, you get some training in something, you can tell something's there, but you can also tell you haven't quite got the whole picture. So you start seeking out knowledge from other sources, hoping to fill in the gaps in your "picture." How many people have you known who have achieved black belts in karate, and then judo, and then aikido? A lot of people are satisfied to leave it right there, apparently content with the idea that karate really is mostly block-punch-kick and you have to get grappling from elsewhere. Some of the arts I mentioned above really don't amount to much more than collections of techniques drawn from karate and judo and, maybe, arnis. I don't blame the founders of those arts. What would you do if you came home from military service with a black belt in Shotokan and your neighbor came home with a black belt in judo, and you went to the same church? Or something like that?

But American Kenpo seems different to me, and I think it is different principally because of Ed Parker.

Now, there is more than one theory of how American Kenpo came to be. It may very well be that some people came here to read this post just to see what this no-name blogger had to say about its history. I am not going to get into an argument about American Kenpo's history with anyone, so if you disagree with me, that is fine, you are not the first and you will not be the last. I may well be wrong and if I am, I will still go home and sleep well.

Having said that, for those of you who haven't heard it, the story in many kenpo circles is that James Mitose was born in Hawaii and was then sent back as a lad to Japan for training in his ancestral religion and martial art, that art being a variety of kenpo. He then came back to Hawaii and taught a number of students.

Mitose eventually left Hawaii. My understanding is that he was eventually arrested on the mainland, charged with being an accomplice to murder, and died in prison. That much seems to be fairly certain. However, I don't believe that story about James Mitose bringing an ancestral Japanese martial art to Hawaii at all. You can poke about the web for people making arguments for it and arguments against it, and in my opinion, those making arguments against it have much the better of the argument.

What I think happened is this: Mitose picked up a smattering of martial arts from only-God-knows where and combined it with what he had seen of Okinawan karate. If memory serves, both Choki Motobu and Chojun Miyagi made visits to Hawaii within Mitose's lifetime. I think (though I cannot prove) that Mitose took what he had learned and turned it into a temporary means of making a living. You may wonder how he was able to do this, probably not being what we think of as a genuine karate master, and all I can tell you is that in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king! Back when I was in taekwon-do and defending myself with a simple reverse punch, the people on the receiving end of that punch, simple as it was, certainly thought that I knew what I was talking about.

I don't think Mitose had to be a real "master" for people to be impressed with him.

One of Mitose's students was William K.S. Chow, who had apparently learned some kung fu--what kind? Heck if I know--from his father. "Thunderbolt" Chow took what he had learned from Mitose and blended it with his father's kung fu and passed the result on to, among others, Ed Parker. If nothing else, it was rough stuff and the people behind it had a vital--vital--interest in being able to stay alive on the street.

Parker took the art to the mainland and, as far as I can tell, kept "cooking" it. You can see a real progression in Parker's kenpo from his first books to his last. Although I am convinced that he added to what he learned from Chow (I have read at least one source that strongly suggested he spent some time training in Hung Gar kung fu), it does not appear to me that he just added techniques willy-nilly to his system. It appears to me that he really attempted to understand what was going on anatomically and in terms of kinesiology, and he made a serious effort to systematize what he had learned and come up with. Parker, as far as I can tell, accepted and absorbed what he had an opportunity to learn, but he didn't blindly accept it. He kept asking himself, "Why does it work? Can it be improved? Can I prove that it works in real life? Is it the best way to do it?" His life vis-a-vis martial arts appears to have been a continual process of absorbing, refining, and improving whatever he could find, from whatever sources were willing to part with it. It intrigues me because it seems a peculiarly American approach to martial arts, and because it seems to me that it is the same approach that the Okinawan masters of karate took . If Ed Parker's American Kenpo isn't the equal of classical Okinawan karate (specifically RyuTe), it's not his fault. The Okinawan masters carried out their research over the course of centuries, and through Taika Seiyu Oyata, it is still going on. Ed Parker had only his own lifetime and during it, he created an art that while, again, not the equal of classical Okinawan karate, is sure as **** better than most of the "karoddy" (to borrow a term from Openhand) that you find around this country today.

At least when it's taught well. That is an issue. Not every kenpo instructor out there is a good one.

Oh, well. Just some meandering thoughts from a middle-aged man without any particular claim to expertise. Hope I didn't bore you too much.

It's All About How You Feel, Isn't It?

2011-10-19T15:39:00.000-07:00

I have, of course, been hearing about the Occupy Wall Street goings-on on the radio, and seeing headlines on Drudge, for a few weeks now.

I haven't been impressed. It would have really surprised me if I had been impressed. These are crowds, after all, and in my experience, crowds are not generally notable for the depth of their thinking. You don't expect to whip up crowds with serious political and economic analysis. Crowds can generally entertain only a few simple ideas at a time (often only one), and the Occupy Wall Street crowds seem not be to be the exceptions to that rule.

I hear that there have been some instances of excessive force being used by the police on elements of these crowds, and that frankly wouldn't surprise me. Too many police really don't know much about how to get a non-compliant person moving without damaging him in some way.

It doesn't make me think that the Occupiers are little innocent waifs, though.

I've heard of these Occupiers doing things like defecating on U.S. flags, defecating on police cars, fouling the campsites (some of them on private property) wherever they go, agitating in front of people's homes. Last time I perused Drudge, I saw and followed links pointing out that the Nazi Party and Communist Party in the U.S. are supporting the Occupiers and showing Occupiers singing "**** the USA." I've heard sound bites of these people with the most insane list of demands. Minimum wage of 20 bucks an hour. Elimination of all debts. Some were openly calling for violent communist revolution. I've heard openly anti-semitic remarks about "Jewish bankers."

I've heard sound bite after sound bite of these people. Many of them don't even come close to making sense. I would give odds that not one in a hundred of them have the faintest notion of how Wall Street and the finances of nations actually work.

One of the most galling aspects of this "movement" is that the participants are clearly not working people. These do not appear to be otherwise responsible people taking time off from work to participate in the political process. These are not people bringing the perspective of the working classes to bear on the economics of the nation. These appear to be know-nothings--college-educated know-nothings in some cases, but know-nothings nonetheless--gathered together to protest things they do not understand.

And some of you people are familiar only with news sources that do not point out the aimlessly nihilistic nature of the movement, but instead dwell largely on such instances of excessive force as the police provide. I don't think you want to look further than that. You don't want to find out that the Occupiers aren't just a bunch of folks peacefully and respectfully protesting deranged Wall Street practices, but a bunch of know-nothings being herded into, basically, agitating for overthrow of the Western way of life and used for political leverage by elements of the Left.

Part of you really wants to be believe that it's Woodstock all over again, don't you? You're barely looking at what these ignorant, nihilistic skulls full of mush are saying and I'm not sure you'd appreciate its significance if you did. For you (as, I suspect, it is for many of them) it's all about the experience, about the way it makes you feel. It's John and Yoko and Give Peace a Chance and the Summer of Love all over again in your minds. It doesn't register with you that Wall Street and Barack Obama have had a mutually supportive relationship, that much of big business depends on the power of big government, that Nancy Pelosi is out there saying "God bless" a movement that has people defecating on U.S. flags, that the Occupiers are being played up, for political purposes, as the "real" America, that these crowds of empty-headed know-nothings are being played like fiddles. It's never even occurred to you that some in politics might find it useful to create the perception that society is crumbling, that chaos is about to erupt, and that we need their strong leadership to keep the peace. It's never even occurred to you that the Occupiers just might be nothing more than useful idiots.

For too many Americans, it's all about how you feel. Substance is a side issue. All kinds of unmitigated Hell can be turned loose on your country, your homes, your families, your lives, and it doesn't really matter to you. What matters is how you feel about it.

Second Choice

2011-10-16T17:04:00.000-07:00

I can't tell you how grateful I am for the opportunity to study RyuTe. I honestly do think there is no finer martial arts system in the world. But sometimes I think, "What would I have done if there weren't someone in the Tulsa area to teach RyuTe?"

I wouldn't have spent a lifetime in Taekwon-do, that's for sure.

There is someone teaching Ed Parker's American Kenpo here, and if I couldn't be in a RyuTe club, I think I would prefer what I see here to anything I've seen in judo, aikido, jujutsu, kung fu, arnis, Goju Ryu, taekwon-do,etc.

But I'm glad I don't have to "settle" for second best.

Why You'll Never Impress Me with Stories of Conservative Racism

2011-10-11T05:21:00.000-07:00

I use the term "libtard" a number of times in this post. If you are one of my liberal friends, rest assured that you are not a libtard. There is a difference between a liberal and a libtard. I have liberal friends; I have yet to acquire any libtard friends. My liberal friends, this post is not about you.

I got to thinking about this subject this afternoon, and unfortunately wound up with too many good ideas (and titles! I will be writing another post, to be titled, "Curse of the Libtard" shortly) to work into one post, especially one (hopefully) short enough to be suited to the short attention spans of the few liberals that might read it.

I'll try to be brief:

1) You'll never impress me with stories of conservative racism because there are too many conservatives. That is, there are millions of people who claim to be conservative in this country alone, and you don't have to have more than two brain cells to rub together (Unless you're a libtard. You might need a few more, yours being of low quality.) to figure out that in any group of that size, of course there are going to be some who hold opinions that are, shall we say, less than optimal. Just because, in a nation that probably has a minimum of thirty or forty million self-identified conservatives, you can find a few--or thirty, or forty, or even thousands, that have used the word "nigger," it doesn't logically follow that conservatives are racists.

Again, slowly, for the drive-by libtard reader: you may prove that there are racist conservatives, but that does not prove that conservatives are racists, just as you may prove that there are brown dogs, but that does not prove that dogs are brown.

2) You'll never impress me with stories of conservative racism because, dear libtard reader, you've too often proven to me that you do not actually know what racism is. You continually confuse racism with a host of other things, in such a way that it ultimately becomes clear that to a libtard, "racist" essentially equates to "not liberal." Honestly: I have seen libtards refer to opposition to social programs as "racist," for no better reason than that the beneficiaries of some of those programs are disproportionately black.

Why should I be impressed with your stories of conservative racism when you've spent so much time showing me that you have, at best, a tenuous grasp of what racism is?

3) You'll never impress me with stories of conservative racism because, dear libtard reader, you've too often proven to me that you don't actually have a clue what conservatism is. Time and again, I have watched you confuse the politics of various statist regimes with conservative thinking, completely oblivious to the glaring contradictions between the two.

Libtards almost never have any clue what the intellectual heritage of conservatism is. Talk to them of Russell Kirk, and they will look at you as though you've a horn growing out of your forehead. And you might as well mention the satellites of Jupiter as bring up Edmund Burke. They have no idea, as a rule, who he was or what he said.

Why should I be impressed with your stories of conservative racism when you've spent so much time showing me that you have, at best, a murky grasp of what conservatism is?

4) You'll never impress me with stories of conservative racism because racism is no part of conservative thinking. There are, to be sure, streams within conservatism, just as there are streams within liberalism (I would never confuse my liberal friends with libtards. God forbid!). I have written on this before; you can search the blog if you're interested. There are "mainstream" conservatives; Paleocons; Crunchy Cons; Neocons; "Social" (primarily Christian) conservatives, and so forth. Not one of these groups will tell you that some races are, by nature, inferior to certain other races (that is the definition of racism, if you were wondering). To be sure, you may find a few (darn few, in my experience) individuals within these groups that have racist ideas, but...see point one.

5) You'll never impress me with stories of conservative racism because you've too often proven that you're completely blind to the racism, bigotry, and hatred within your own libtard ranks (not to mention the other "isms" present there). I saw and heard the way you talked about, and drew cartoons about, Condi Rice. I've read what libtards have to say about Michelle Malkin. I remember the libtard that said she hoped Clarence Thomas died, like so many black men, of heart disease. It is despicable. But you libtards turn a blind eye to it because, in the end, to you, the charge of "racism" is just a tool with which you can assault your political enemies, not something over which you have genuine concern.

Yes, I just called you libtards "hypocrites." Congratulations on figuring that one out.

6) You'll never impress me with stories of conservative racism because I just know too many conservatives. I referred to this in my last post. Look, libtards and libtardettes, most of the people I know reasonably well are conservatives of one stripe or another. Some are more conservative, some are less, some are conservative on this issue but not on that issue, but I'm really not going too far in saying that most of the people I know reasonably well are conservatives.

I don't know any of them that are racists. Seriously. To tar any of them as "racist," you have to torture the definition of racism (see point 2).

How on earth do you think you're going to persuade me that conservatives are racist when none of the conservatives I know are racists?

7) You'll never impress me with stories of conservative racism because there are too many black (and brown) conservatives. Sadly, it is when you libtards write about them that your own bigotry and vitriol most often boils over. Words fail me when thinking of the venom that's been heaped on Clarence Thomas, on Michelle Malkin, on Condi Rice.

Libtards' thinking just can't quite grasp the significance of people like Clarence Thomas, Michelle Malkin, Condi Rice, Star Parker, La Shawn Barber (whom I follow on Twitter, and who has graciously responded to some of my tweets), Lloyd Marcus, Thomas Sowell, Herman Cain (currently near the top in Republican polling--kind of weird for an allegedly racist party, wouldn't you think?), and...Mike.

"Mike?" you ask? I don't know his last name, but Mike is a black gent, a driver for Triple A, whom I met a couple of years ago. You see, I drive this ratty old Bronco II, which I dearly love and hope to restore someday, and there for a while, a couple of years ago, I was having pretty regular trouble with it. One of the few benefits of my job is that I get Triple A coverage, and the first time I met Mike was when I had to have Triple A come out and pick me up on a back road. While Mike was lowering the platform on his truck, he was playing his radio at full volume because he didn't want to miss a word of what Michael Savage had to say. I guess people had commented on his taste in talk radio before, because he felt obliged to turn to me at one point and tell me, "Not all of us voted for Obama!"

Mike picked up me and my Bronco II a couple of other times over the next several months. He's consistent. He's not fooling. He's a conservative.

Mike and people like him fry libtard minds. The fact that there are black conservatives puts libtards in the position of having either to admit that conservatism doesn't equal being against black people, or of having to accuse people like Mike of being stupid or sellouts. With almost clockwork regularity, libtards choose the second option, apparently clueless as to how bigoted accusing a black man of being a sellout or a fool for disagreeing with them makes them look.

8) You'll never impress me with stories of conservative racism because--and this will no doubt come as a shock to your poor little libtard soul--I actually know, and have known, a lot of black people. Brown people, too.

I swear, libtards often write and speak as though conservatives have never actually met a person of color, like they don't know what they're like. It's amazing. You really seem to think you can say almost any stupid thing about black people and conservatives and since, in your libtard minds, no conservatives actually know black people, we'll never be able to call you on it!

I wrote about some of the black people I've known in this post, which I also linked in my last post, but I know perfectly well you libtards didn't read it.

Libtards and libtardettes, in my life, I have been in the Marine Corps Reserve, worked in the restaurant business for fourteen years, worked in call centers, and, for most of the last eight years, worked in a field that gives me direct and almost-daily contact with heavy consumers of social services. I know, and have known, lots and lots of blacks and hispanics. And having known so many, let me assure you, dear libtard reader, I have a much better idea how they behave and what they say than you might think!

It is almost comical to watch or read libtards act as though certain words were proof-positive of racism. Almost comical, that is, to anyone who actually knows a lot of black people.

One time, I brought a short stick with which I happened to be working to our summer training in the Mojave Desert. My A-gunner--assistant gunner--saw it, asked what it was, and upon being told that it was a martial arts weapon, said, "It sure looks like a nigger-knocker to me." He was, of course, a "dark green" Marine, that is to say, for those of you who haven't been in the Corps, he was black.

How seriously do you expect me to take your charges of racism when Lilly, one of the Wal-Mart employees I have gotten to know a bit over my years of shopping there, was obviously upset with someone on the phone, and, when asked what she was upset about, replied, in frustration and almost at the top of her lungs, "BLACK PEOPLE!!"? Racism? I have no doubt that if she was white, you libtards would charge her with it. But Lilly is black.

One of my best friends in this world is a 74-year-old black lady named Rose. When she tells me how she cautioned a grand-daughter to take her car to a real mechanic, not to get it "nigger-rigged," when she tells me how she told an errant male relative to "get his black *** over here," just how seriously do you expect me to take you when you tell stories about how some conservative or other used the word "nigger," and how that proves that conservatives are racists?

Haven't you libtards ever been around a group of black folks and heard one say to another, "Nigga, please"?

I'm not saying that it's a good idea to use the word "nigger," but honestly, has it never occurred to you libtards that if black people routinely use the word, saying "nigger" doesn't automatically mean you're against all black people? Are you really that stupid?

As I wrote in this post, I've had black folks tell me--quietly, as though they were afraid someone might overhear--that the behavior of some black folks made them ashamed to be black, or that they didn't like black people. Do you seriously expect me to consider the possibility that those black people thought that black people are, by nature, inferior? If not, why on earth would you expect me to believe that conservatives who say that black culture is deteriorating are racists?

Libtards, I know you'll never quit accusing conservatives and Republicans of institutional racism. If you admit that conservative opposition to your ideas has little to do with race and much to do with the feckless and often murderous record of your ideas, you are, conversationally and publicly speaking, cooked. Accusing conservatives of racism is just one of the ways you have of diverting attention from your failed ideology, so you won't ever give it up.

But I, and others like me, won't ever fall for it.

The Mark of the Idiot

2011-10-08T19:06:00.000-07:00

Been a while since I've posted. Been busy, still am, so I'll keep this short and sweet:

You know, don't you, that I identify myself as a Tea Partier? Well, if you didn't, you know now.

Probably most of the people I know would describe themselves as Tea Partiers, or at least not unfriendly to the Tea Party. It's probably fair to say that most of the people I know would describe themselves as conservative, even the few that don't identify themselves as Tea Partiers.

I do know some liberals, and some of them I like and get on quite well with. Those are not the people I'm writing about today.

The people I'm writing about today are the fatuous twits who simply cannot see a Tea Partier--or a conservative, for that matter--without seeing a racist.

Friends, I know not one--not ONE--Tea Partier who could fairly be described as a racist. I do know Tea Partiers who oppose racial set-asides, who oppose welfare programs that mostly benefit minorities, who think that Black American culture is suffering badly, and so forth, but it requires an extraordinary degree of ignorance or stupidity to describe those as racist positions. Even to suggest that any one of them is racist shows blissful ignorance of the definition of the word.

It floors me that a political movement that currently seems to be enamored of, for crying out loud, Herman Cain, an obviously black man, can be tarred as "racist," but I have seen the attempt made. It floors me that a political movement that practically worships Col. Allen West, another obviously black man, can be tarred as "racist," but I have seen it done. It floors me that a political movement that has, for one of its most lively writers, Lloyd Marcus, another obviously black man, can be tarred as "racist," but I have seen it done, even by people who know that the Tea Party has blacks and other minorities in it. They do it, basically, by asserting that our minority members candidates aren't real minorities, or are sellouts, or stupid.

Mighty **** broad-minded of you, pally...

The situation has gotten so bad that I cannot look at someone calling Tea Partiers "racist" and fail to think of him as a complete idiot. Calling Tea Partiers "racist" has become a badge, a mark--the Mark of the Idiot.

For more of my thoughts on racism, go here.

And, of course, they're still at it, trying to tar the whole barrel with a few bad apples, in spite of headlines like this one. As God is my witness, one of the things I'm hoping for most is the sight of libtards trying to tell me that their opposition to Herman Cain's presidential policies isn't racist but that my opposition to Barack Obama's was racist.

Visualizing and Achieving The Good Life

2011-08-21T19:56:00.000-07:00

I started this post back in late May.

I started it because I have grown increasingly convinced that I can do better with my life. Better in a lot of ways. I am like everyone else on the planet. Strong in some ways, surprisingly strong. Weak in others, very weak. I have yet to meet, at least as far as I know, any human being who isn't like that. Once you know that the fault lines are there, must be there, you start to see them. I am sure others see them in me, just as I see them in others.

I really don't think that I have made as much of my strengths as I might, nor minimized and compensated for my weaknesses as much as I might. I am not, have not, been making the most of my life (Don't laugh, especially if you came here as the result of a Google search! The same could most likely be said of you!) And increasingly, I have become convinced that one step in correcting the situation is to think very, very clearly about just what sort of life I hope to achieve in my remaining years.

The old adage that if you aim at nothing in particular, you will be sure to hit it every time, is, I think, still true. So, here, developed over some little time, are my thoughts about what I want my life to be like. I am writing them down because the exercise of doing so will make my thinking clearer, and I am making them public--at least the overwhelming majority of them--because there might be, over the years, a handful of similarly-situated souls looking for other people's thoughts. Also, I hate to do this much writing without publishing it, even if it's just in the blogosphere. Also, there might actually be a person or two out there interested in helping me. And lastly, there might be a few people who find this little journey inside my skull interesting--perhaps in a pathological sort of way! (Others, of course, find this whole thing unbearably narcissistic and have already moved on, and I don't blame them a bit.)

FOOD AND COOKING

I want to be very careful about how I write this section. The way I've written about this subject before has raised some hackles. You know, I have written more than once about cooking, and I do the majority of the cooking in our home, and I have a multiplicity of cookbooks on my shelves. I suppose it would be easy for people to think that I enjoy cooking. It would be more accurate, though, to say that I don't dislike cooking and that I see it as an art fundamental to life and the enjoyment thereof. I have often said that if other people would cook what I want to eat, I might never cook again and I really don't think I'd miss it that much. That is not to say that I wish someone else would do all the cooking, or that I think it's anyone else's responsibility to do all of the cooking, or that I think anyone is less a fully-developed human being because he doesn't cook. It's just a reflection of the reality that it's not cooking per se that I enjoy so much, it's eating decent food that I enjoy.

I get tired, when I have to resort to it, of take-out crap and convenience foods.

Normal people, that is, people that aren't quite wealthy, have to cook. It's just part of normal life, whether I enjoy it enough for it to be a hobby in its own right or whether I see it as just the necessary means by which I get to enjoy decent meals at a decent price. If I had the wealth of Rush Limbaugh, I might well never set foot in the kitchen again, in the same way that I might never look under the hood of a car again, had I that kind of wealth.

I don't have that kind of wealth. I have to cook, I have to shoulder at least part of the cooking in the house. Furthermore, other people often actually like what I cook, and I like that and it does my soul some good and is a source of satisfaction, so I'm likely to be doing a fair amount of cooking for the rest of my days.

A further reality is that I love good food and think of it as a marvelous gift from God. It affects life on so many levels.

If that's the case, I know what I want--what I want to have, what I want to do. The kitchen of our old house is adequate, at least mostly so. There is no dishwasher, but that doesn't bother me. I do want more help keeping up with the dishes. I'd like to have a clock in there, and more timers, and a radio, one with an antenna that I can hook up outside, so that I can get the stations I'm interested in more clearly. It's a whole lot more pleasant to spend an evening in the kitchen when you're able to listen to Cardinals baseball. I'd like to replace the refrigerator. Nothing fancy, but I would like it to be black. Color me strange!

If I could just get the Food Network and skip the rest of cable TV, I'd do it.

There's not a whole lot more space for shelving or storage in there, and I'd like to do some canning sooner or later, which means I'm going to have to find someplace relatively stable--temperature-wise--to keep my home-canned goods.

Don't need a whole lot more in the way of kitchen equipment. I love my Henckels knives and my smokers and my Le Creuset dutch oven, and would like to add one of their 2 3/4 qt lidded saucepans. I suppose I could add a food processor to my collection of kitchen gadgets, but I really don't know that I'd use it that much. I would definitely like to replace my grill--another Weber would be fine--and buy an electric element for my water-smoker and a couple of smoker boxes.

I'd like to grow at least some of what we eat. Actually, I'd like to grow a lot of what we eat. I recall reading an article in The Mother Earth News once about a family that had managed to turn just about every square inch of their property into productive garden. They harvested thousands of pounds of food every year off what amounted to a suburban yard. I don't have that
kind of ambition, but I would like to do better than we have been. It is not going to be easy. Due to the trees--some on my property, some on neighbors' property--there is not a whole lot of my backyard that gets the six or more hours of steady daylight necessary to grow everything I would like. I will have to make use of container gardening and shade-friendly plants. I do know that we can successfully grow zucchini. That, at least, grew pretty well, in the only year where I attempted to grow anything other than a tomato.

For tomatoes, I'm going to have to get creative. I'll figure something out.

I would really like for everybody to pitch in with the cooking. It's more fun and less time-consuming if everyone takes part. And I think the food tastes better, too, and it's good for family relationships.

I would like my cooking to focus mostly on grilled and smoked foods, Tex-Mex, and Southwestern. I don't have the fear of dietary fat that so many folks do (read this book!), but I would definitely like to keep refined carbohydrates to an absolute minimum. I do want to make room for honeys, though--not just the ubiquitous clover honey that you get at the grocery store, but what you might call artisanal honeys, or herbal honeys, honey that reflects one particular plant. You can get 'em, but you have to mail-order 'em, and I'm not quite ready, financially, to do that. Maybe soon.

I'd definitely like there to be more in the way of seasonal cooking around here, that is, I'd really like you to be able to walk into our house and be able to tell from the tastes and the aromas that it's Fall, or Christmastime, or getting close to Saint Patrick's Day.

You may have noticed that I haven't mentioned eating out. That's because in general, I really don't like it that much. Oh, it's okay, and I know that a lot of folks really enjoy it, but I'd much rather eat something that we've prepared at home. Unless we're talking barbecue. I do enjoy eating at barbecue joints and don't get to do it as much as I would like. That is probably more reflective of my interest in barbecue than of my interest in eating out although I do enjoy the atmosphere of most barbecue joints. They are always clearly working-class establishments, not hoity-toity at all.

I have never objected to eating off thrift-store plates and drinking out of jelly glasses and second-hand coffee cups and the like. As a matter of fact, it kind of--perhaps absurdly--gives me the feeling of being out in the country. It is pure redneck, pure country-style Americana.

Now, about desserts. I don't have much against desserts per se. I am just convinced that they are really hard to deal with nutritionally. There are few things of which I'm more fully convinced than that refined sugar and flour are bad for you.

But even if I could live without desserts, I still like them at least a bit, and others really love them. So what to do? Well, no store-bought crap, to start with. If we're going to have a sliver of dessert, it at least needs to be something decent, something that we've made at home. There's no point in spending those precious few dessert calories on crap like "Little Debbies."

HOLIDAYS

One of the things I have long regretted about our household is that we never have really gotten the hang of enjoying the holidays (or the seasons, for that matter) to their utmost. We never seem to be quite ready, never quite prepared.

I want to decorate very heavily for Christmas--not the day after Thanksgiving, mind you, that is too soon--but perhaps by the 5th of December.

I want to decorate for "Fall Festival," aka "Hallowe'en," and Thanksgiving, too. And New Year's Day, and Valentine's Day, and Saint Patrick's Day, and Independence Day, and Veteran's Day. When a holiday is approaching, I want you to be able to knock on our door and tell immediately that we're celebrating something. I want you to smell something distinctive from the kitchen: Corned beef and cabbage for St. Pat's, heart-shaped butter cookies for Valentine's Day, barbecue and hot dogs on the Fourth, smoked turkey and dressing and ham on Thanksgiving and Christmas, and sparkling wine on New Year's.

I want to be able to go to church on Christmas morning. If I can't do that, I at least want to have a brief worship service at home.

I want to do more visiting during the holiday season, and have more guests. I am not generally fond of big parties, but I would like to have small groups of guests, or go somewhere where there is such a gathering.

I want to go to the Christmas Parade, and I want it to be called the Christmas Parade, not the "holiday parade," and I want to go to the Festival of Trees every year, and drive around Midtown and look at the rich people's lights. And I'd like to put at least a few lights on our own house.

GAMES

I almost titled this section, "Leisure Activities," but that really doesn't do it. I am talking about games, two games to be specific: chess and go. Both are classic strategy and thinking games.

I am not good at either one. Oh, I have books on them, some excellent books, but I haven't finished them.

What I'd really like to do is gradually work through my two big books on chess and all five books of Soo-Hyun and Kim's Learn to Play Go series. And I would like to go down to the go club that meets, last I heard, at the TU campus on Saturday afternoons, and to the chess club that meets at the OSU-Tulsa campus. Not every week for each of them, mind you, I don't think I will ever be able to pull that one off. But I'd like to be able to look forward to attending one or the other at least every other week, and maybe to an occasional game on the internet. I'd like to occasionally invite a friend over for a couple of games of chess and a frosty beverage or two. I'd like eventually to be able to meet Openhand at some seminar in Missouri and play a game of go with him.

Now, it should go without saying that I'd like to play these games with the family, too. Sadly, the only person who ever shows any interest, so far, is Middle Son, currently age nine. He gets in a mood where he likes to play chess from time to time, and I scarcely have to give him any kind of advantage anymore. No one, I can say with confidence, need be intimidated by my skills, but if a real disparity exists, it is easy enough to handicap the more powerful player in both these games, so that he has a more challenging game to play and the weaker player need not feel doomed from the get-go.

I've already got a decent go board and stones, probably as good as I will ever want to own. I've got a tolerable chessboard, too, and I won't be brokenhearted if I never replace it, but ultimately, I'd like to have a bigger board and chessmen. Boxwood and ebony, please.

RYUTE

If you're not familiar with this blog, perhaps having come here from a Google search, you might be wondering just what the heck "RyuTe" is. I'll be very brief: it is a martial arts system, organized and systematized by the very remarkable Taika Seiyu Oyata. If you want to know more, click here.

I'd like to do RyuTe for sixty to ninety minutes a day, six days a week. Maybe just kata in slow, continuous motion on Sundays.

A couple of times a year, I'd like to go to a seminar. The ones in Amarillo and Wichita are within reasonable driving distance.

I would, someday, like to teach RyuTe. More than that, I think that someday I am going to be responsible to teach RyuTe. I think it's that important to pass this system down.

I'd kind of like to teach in a church setting, say, in the basement/youth room at our church, but I'd want to make the classes open to anyone of decent character who wants to do the work. I do have a special desire to reach Tulsa's Christian, and most especially, Tulsa's Christian homeschooling community with this system. People in the homeschooling community, more so than most, are ready to accept (upon appropriate examination) the Old Ways. If you go to them and say, "Look at this, this is the way karate is supposed to be, the way it was 175 years ago, a life-protection art based on anatomy, kinesiology, physics, and the norms of human perception, it will help you to stay healthy, it will help you and your children to stay a little bit safer, it will help you to become and stay a disciplined person," I think they will be more ready to listen than most people in the population, who are forever chasing after the latest fad, whether it be in religion, martial arts, or popular entertainment. RyuTe would, I think, shall we say, be temperamentally and attitudinally appropriate for the homeschooling community, and vice versa.

Not everyone in RyuTe knows all the weapons, it seems. I'd like to be a jo specialist, but also to learn at least the kihon kata for nunchaku, tanbo, and sai.

CHURCH LIFE

I belong to a church in the heart of Tulsa, a church that you could describe as "big," in the sense that the physical plant is pretty big, and "average" in that the total attendance on Sunday morning is about average for most Southern Baptist churches, which is to say, about 200 or so. It is a church like so many in this part of Tulsa, like a very great many across the country, really. It's dying. Most of the churches in the heart of Tulsa are graying and thinning out and they are dying.

Some of them used to be among the fastest-growing and largest congregations in the country.

What happened?

Well, there are a lot of things that have happened. I am still learning about some of it But one of the things, I am convinced, is that transportation and ease of communication are actually working against the neighborhood church.

If you go to a seminar, or have a workshop on church growth, one of the things you will find out is that a church's natural territory--at least in a city, I don't know about in the countryside--is considered to be everything within about a three-mile radius.

Couple that with the fact--at least I think it's a fact--that the majority of people hear about Jesus from a friend or a relative.

Then ask yourself if you, or any of your friends and relatives, live within a three-mile radius of your church. If you go to an older church, in an older part of the city, I think it is likely you are going to say, "No!"

People can drive--so they, or their children, move out to other parts of town and if they're so inclined, they can still attend the old church they've always attended, but their friends, their relatives, their lives, are all outside that three-mile radius around their church. Naturally, it then becomes very, very difficult for the church members to reach the people around the church! Nobody should be surprised. Nothing could be more natural.

Some people are going to home churches or things like that and I see nothing wrong with that, if that's what you want to do, except that I think that it tends to reinforce a certain cliquishness in some cases, that is, I think there is a pretty good likelihood that you are going to get all eggheads in one group, all the emotionistas in another, and so forth, and that's not altogether good.

And then there's the bad teaching--not in my church, actually, I think our pastor is pretty good (critics would say that he appeals to "eggheads" like moi), one of the few left that actually does expository preaching, and he's not inclined to dumb things down--but it seems to me like there's almost an active contempt rampant in the North American church, a contempt for any sort of teaching that goes beyond the very basics. I will never forget asking my then-teenaged oldest son what the problem with Adult Sunday School lessons was, and he immediately shot back with, "It's the kids' lessons, only with bigger words." If you question this, in most churches and most Sunday School departments, you will be told that the material cannot be made too complex or we will alienate visitors, completely overlooking the fact that visitors are not exactly overrunning the building. And then, if you are not already a teacher of some kind, you will be told that you know so much, you ought to be teaching!

No thought will be given to the possibility that most visitors are not so stupid as to be unable to figure out when their intelligence has been insulted.

In my opinion, the teaching in most churches in North America is execrable. I do not even have to go to them to see in order to have a pretty good idea. Why? Well, just ask around. For example, how many Christians do you know that feel confident in their ability to clearly articulate the Gospel? In my experience--and yes, I have asked--most Christians don't feel terribly confident in their ability to clearly articulate the Gospel, or to answer questions and objections, and more often than not, they don't even try (I believe the stats indicate that something less than 10 percent of all Christians will ever share their faith with strangers).

They just keep coming to Sunday School and church services, hoping all the while, I guess, that they will eventually gain enough knowledge to be able to tell other people what they believe about God, life, death, eternity, and salvation. To my mind, the situation looks like a massive, systemic failure to educate and train, despite a massive Sunday School program and the availability of enough literature to choke a moose.

It doesn't help that a lot of people seem to like it that way. It amazes me how many people say they're afraid to share the Gospel, on the grounds that they don't know enough to answer objections, and then won't come to a Sunday School class heavily geared to equipping people to explain and defend their beliefs.

What to do? How to keep my church and others like it from dying? Well, I envision building a church like this:

On Sunday mornings, first, in Sunday School, we'd tackle whatever subjects the class was interested in pursuing in depth, getting people involved in the discussion and accustomed to discussing and defending what they believed. Then we'd have a service where the Gospel was preached, the text of Scripture was expounded, and Christ exalted. Then there'd be a potluck lunch, and maybe a softball game, or maybe some indoor games (chess or go, anyone?). Then everyone'd go home for a nap, and come back at night for more preaching, teaching, and prayer, maybe followed by some sandwiches (Potluck sandwiches. If you try to make the church responsible for the sandwiches, it'll just create a burden that nobody wants to bear).

I have to say a word about "worship," or, more specifically, about music.

Worship is an absolute joke in most churches, at least most churches I've been to--including ours. That is not to say the music is, quote-unquote, "bad." Often, the music minister and musicians and choir are very capable.

But that is not corporate worship. In all the years I've been going to Baptist churches, I have seen precisely one man I would call a worship leader, in that he always managed to get everybody in the sanctuary singing their hearts out. Most music ministers, together with most choirs, are not leading worship. They are performing for the congregation. That is not right at all.

A worship leader needs to be far more concerned about leading the congregation in corporate worship than about how he and the choir sound.

Monday night'd be visitation. Not like most churches, where "visitation" means visiting people who should've been removed from the rolls years before, or visiting people that brought their kids to the "Fall Festival" five years in a row (that kind of stuff is, in my experience, a complete waste of time), but visiting, first, the members who couldn't be at church due to illness or frailty, those who are having a hard time in one way or another (I am as convinced as I can be that one of the modern church's problems is that we have so emphasized ministry to the community that we have let our ministry to our members slacken. This should not be. Paul suggested strongly that we should tend to the brethren first), and then just going door-to-door in the neighborhood, asking people how we could pray for them, and sharing the Gospel where the Lord opens the door. I would suggest strongly that the same people not do visitation every week, not unless they feel truly compelled. Rather, a whole bunch of people should rotate visitation duties. Nobody should be allowed to become overwhelmed.

Tuesday nights, the clubs would meet. As I mentioned in the section on RyuTe, someday I'd love to teach a class at the church. I picture an energetic, sweaty class, where the emphasis is on health and self-defense, not fighting, not aggression, with maybe just enough free-sparring thrown in to satisfy those that want to compete in an occasional tournament (Tournament fighting is useless for self-defense, but some people find them a lot of fun). There could, and should, be other clubs--whatever people were interested in. Maybe Praisemoves for some. Maybe Pilates. Maybe a homeschooling support group. The point is to have neighborhood Christian people with a common interest be able to satisfy that interest and desire for fellowship through the neighborhood church, not so much to use those activities to attract lost people to the
church--although, God knows, you wouldn't want to turn lost people away from those clubs, and you'd certainly want lost people taught the Gospel while they're at the church.

Wednesday nights'd be for discipleship training and prayer. Classes on all sorts of stuff, from in-depth study of various books of the Bible, to home economics (we all need to know how to stretch a dollar, folks), to New Testament Greek. Classes'd be preceded by a potluck meal and followed by a prayer session.

I think that's the way church oughta be. And very frankly, I think in our case, we need to seriously consider merging with the Hispanic church that meets in our building. They are actually growing, in part, I think, because so many Hispanic families have moved into the neighborhood, and, like I said, people do hear about Jesus from their friends and neighbors.

Many times I think the ideal is to have a little church like this in every neighborhood, with the social life of the whole neighborhood revolving around it. I'm about half-convinced that when we got to the point where you had to drive to church instead of walk (or ride your horse), it allowed us to be too darn selective about who we'd associate with. Being able to drive--I've run across people that drive thirty or more miles to church, folks--well, it seems to me that it makes it easier to ignore the people who are right around us, in favor of people that we find it easier to love. Why would we not expect our neighborhood churches to be dying if we refuse to attend the neighborhood church? And conversely, I can't help but think that if the people and their neighborhood church get all wrapped up in Jesus Christ and in one another, both the churches and the people will quit dying.

That's what, in part, I'm working on for the future. I may die before I see it fully realized. But that's the direction I'm headed.

RUNNING

In a way, I suppose this is a very minor thing. However, I used to enjoy running a bit. I haven't done it, not to speak of, in a long time. But back in the day, I ran a fair number of 5Ks and the Tulsa Run a couple of times, and I really enjoyed them. I saw them, particularly the races I entered every year, as part of the turn of the seasons. I enjoyed the still-cool-and-crisp-not-quite-Spring-but-definitely-not-winter freshness of the St. Patrick's Day 5K, the hot, sticky sweatiness of that race--whatever it was--that the Full Moon Cafe sponsored in the summer, the
unbelievable hills that comprised the Labor Day 5K, and the cold air and the start-of-the-holiday-season feeling of the Tulsa Run. I never did end up running the Jingle Bell Run 5K, but I bet that would have been the capper. And I always wanted to do the Zoo Run.

I miss all of that. But I really don't want to sacrifice my RyuTe training time to run, so what to do?

I think that I'll do a couple of miles--I'll take a few weeks to build up to it, of course, I'm 48 and don't want to do anything stupid--on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and build up to five miles on Saturday mornings. That way, I will be able to comfortably run any 5K (I have never worried about speed) and uncomfortably but successfully run the 15K of the Tulsa Run. And I think I'm going to try to get back into it starting with the Jingle Bell Run, if it still exists.

THE HOUSE AND PROPERTY

In a lot of ways, I am pretty pleased with our little (1400 square feet) house. I have often said that if everything keeps working the way it does now, I wouldn't see any need to mess with it. In the interest of keeping things working, efficiency, improvements, safety, aesthetics, etc, there are some things I'd like to do.

The house doesn't have to be spectacular. I'd like to replace the toilet and redecorate the place. I'd like, as a proactive measure, to put a few piers in place under the floor. Reupholster the furniture, maybe in leather.

Paint or panel the walls, put some gas logs in the fireplace or adapt a wood stove to it, replace the wall furnace. Re-plumb, re-wire, re-insulate, and re-side with hardwood siding. Add several fire extinguishers.

A coffee table. If I am going to have occasional guests, I think we need a coffee table. I'd say "nothing fancy," but in my mind's eye, I picture one of those things made out of polished driftwood. Like as not, I'll never be able to afford one, but maybe I can find or make something a little unusual.

Just for the short term, I'd like to slap some paint on the place shortly, just to buy me some time. Time to scare up the money and skills to pull all the old clapboard siding, replace any rotted timber, reinsulate and install some hardwood siding. It'd look very rustic, plus, I'd like never to have to paint again.

The foundation footings need to be checked. The whole-house fan needs to be repaired. I'd like to rewire the garage, replace the washer, stove, and fridge, get gas heat throughout the house, panel the living and dining rooms, put a ceiling rack for pots, pans, and utensils in the kitchen, and upgrade the ceiling fans. The garage needs to be mostly empty, organized, and with a new side door.

GARDENING AND LANDSCAPING

Roses. Flagpole. garden, gardening containers, a cable slide for the kids, a dog. Hmmmm. How to keep dog out of the garden that I want to grow? Uproot the ugly plants out front and plant some roses.

There are some problems with our yard that I really don't think are solvable. For instance, due to the trees, many of which are on the neighbor's side of the fenceline, I really don't think any part of our yard gets the full 6 hours of sun they say is necessary to raise tomatoes. I know we can raise zucchini because we've done it, and probably other shade-tolerant crops. But if we want tomatoes, I am going to have to try some kind of container gardening or plant them in the front yard. Peach or pear trees might be worth the effort.

I do, of course, already have a makiwara and a bag in the back yard and I really don't know if I need any more martial arts or fitness equipment. I would like to replace the grill, as previously mentioned.

It wouldn't hurt my feelings any to have a small outdoor table.

In the front yard, I like to get rid of all the plants--shrubs, trees, everything, except that one funky-lookin' tree, and plant a few rosebushes.

Other than that, keep it simple and easy to maintain with a weed whacker and a lawnmower.

TRANSPORTATION

You know, the reality is that I just don't like working on cars. I'll do it if there's no way out of it, but I'd really rather not. So you'll understand when I say that while I really wouldn't mind driving my Bronco II 'til they quit making parts for it, I'd also really like to be able to just drive it into R.L. Fix twice a year for a checkup. Same with the other vehicles in the household.

I like the Bronco II. When it runs right, it's nimble and will handle foul weather pretty well. It's a real redneck-mobile and suits my temperament nicely. I figure that to have it "just so" would cost five or six grand. But to just greatly enhance its performance and reliability would be much less--probably less than 1500 bucks--and I suppose I can live with its butt-ugliness. I really can't complain. It's been more than a year since it last went down on me, and last winter, it got me around. As I told everyone who would listen, "It may be an old piece of junk, but it's a 4WD old piece of junk." So since the alternative is coming up with five or six grand to buy a used jeep which will have it's own problems, I guess I'll keep it and strive to come up with 1500 for repairs.

I'd like to have a winch on it. Even if I never use it. It's part of my Redneck Mystique.

It goes without saying that I'd like other family members to have cars that suit them, too, doesn't it? In an ideal world, that would involve at least one pickup. Right now, though, we've got a '98 Dodge Caravan which is, overall, in pretty good shape, but I think we need to add one more vehicle. In another year or so, we're likely to be given a very nice Avalon, but I'd like to get something quicker than that, or--miracle of miracles--resurrect our Aerostar. If I can do that, the one thing I can be sure of is that I'd be the only one willing to drive it, so it'd be a temporary solution at best. Yet it can't be overlooked that I just might be able to do it for less than three hundred bucks...

In an ideal world, I'd add an old Ranger to the fleet and ditch the Aerostar in the next three months.

INTERNET

Gotta move to cable w/a wi-fi hotspot, with multiple laptops. Internet access will probably always be important in our household.

READING AND EDUCATION

I really would like to spend more time reading. As a matter of fact, if I could get away with it, I'd like to retire and spend the bulk of my time reading, for the sad fact is that I feel woefully undereducated. It's ironic, I suppose, for the reality is that people who know me generally think I'm about as much of autodidact as it is possible for a redneck to be.

Sadly, I will probably never have as much time to read and self-educate as I would like, but I can prioritize: much less internet fluff and more classics and history.

Professionally, it woudl be really helpful to clear three big hurdles: one license, one certification, and a big upturn in my command of Spanish, which is microscopic. But if I can accomplish these in the next 6 months, which is very likely, I should just have to have a few CE credits each year after that and my reading time will otherwise be free. And within 18 months, my income should be very noticeably enhanced.

So it's fairly obvious: little to no internet fluff, period; six months of hard professional study, and then mostly classics and history. Sounds like a plan.

FAMILY LIFE

Like to have a few relatives over at holidays and birthdays, and go out to see 'em once a month or so.

Family life is profoundly important. In so many ways, I wish I had time to do things over again.

In general, it seems to me that family life is very difficult to plan, especially as children get older, busier, and more mobile. There are some basics, though, to which I'd like to see. I'd like for everyone to be together at the table for as many mealtimes as reasonably possible. I'd like cooking and cleaning to be family activities. This not only reduces the burden on any one individual, it's educational. Everyone needs to know how to cook and clean. I'd like everyone to attend church together and share in church life and activities.

Where at all possible, I'd like everyone to share activities, all of us go to see the play, for example, or everyone attending the RyuTe test.

Work situations permitting--I've had jobs that kept me working late at night, believe me, I understand scheduling issues--I'd like our sleeping schedules to be roughly similar. We ought to be able to eat breakfast together most of the time.

Some of this is hard to put into words. In general, I'd like to see each family member share in the day-to-day life of the household and embracing a fair share of ordinary household duties.

I'd also like to visit my parents, at least for half a day, about once a month. In addition to the e-mails and phone calls.

DECORATING, INTERIOR AND EXTERIOR

Hardwood siding, wood paneling, gas logs in the fireplace or adapt fireplace to woodstove.

The dickens about saying how I'd like to decorate is that really, I like so many things, so many styles, that it becomes hard to be consistent. When it comes down to it, though, I suppose I'm most comfortable and happy with a look that you might describe as "countrified kitsch," with a few sops to my intellectual vanity thrown in.

We have a very nice sofa and loveseat, 2 recliners built into each one, and for the longest time, I've thought that after the youngest is well past the spill-crap-on-everything stage of life, we ought to have some repairs made and get them reupholstered, maybe in leather. Still might do that. But you know, I'm also thinking that a hide-a-bed might be a very useful thing to have, and if we got that, we'd have to ditch our current sofa.

So I'm still thinkin' about that one.

Yes, I'm one of those people who like stuff like this...

I like my walls to be thick with stuff: photographs, shadow boxes with memorabilia, art prints (I'm especially fond of Van Gogh), even those ridiculous posters (insert example) with every conceivable variety of pepper on them. Frames don't have to be fancy; in fact, if I can get the plastic sheeting required, I'm leaning toward making and painting (in true redneck fashion) my own frames from discarded pallet wood.

Bookshelves everywhere are a necessity, of course.

I'd like to have some shelves up on the walls to display my wife's mementos, too.

About TV, I don't care so much. Since I won't buy cable, since the only thing I'd care to watch is the Food Network, all I ever do, really , is watch some DVDs. But I wouldn't mind having a small stereo, something I could plug my I-Pod into.

DRESS

I hate wearing clothes I have to worry about. Thankfully, I have a job that provides work shirts, and I can wear jeans.

Outside of work, I'm mostly a jeans-and-t-shirt and ball-cap kind of guy, and I have pretty much everything I need, except that I'd like to add a couple more pairs of jeans, and...

...two pairs of low-top Redwing work boots, with big, lugged soles.

And I have to admit that I'm increasingly leaning toward the idea of dressing up a little for church. I guess I'm gonna have to get some deck shoes, slacks, and a tweed sportcoat. And a collared shirt. But that's it. I don't need more than one such monkey suit.

WORK

Work. What can I say about work? When I was younger, I thought that I wanted to be a professional writer, and I think I allowed the fact that I wasn't a professional writer to partly poison my attitude toward other jobs, even though I never really put forth the effort to actually become what I said I wanted to be. I let my writing wanna-b-ism sap my willingness to really put forth all I had in my other jobs.

More and more, I have come to see how wrong this is, and also to see that I don't really have the kind of gift it would take to sustain a full-time writing career. I'd still like to write, though, and I'd like to earn a few simoleons from it...

Couple that with the facts I actually kind of like my current job duties most of the time, that I really need a sharp upward spike in income (lots of challenges coming up!), that I'm about to start studying for two certifications that should lead to at least part of that jump in income, and I think we're looking at a few months of really hard study, and after that, an attempt to start publishing occasional small pieces on a professional level, maybe starting with e-zines.

And if those certifications don't lead to that jump in income? Well, they asked me to guarantee them a year, which shows that they're fully aware that my market value will increase. I told them at the outset that I was comfortable in my job and wasn't out to hold anybody up for a huge and sudden pay increase. Lately, though, I've kind of gotten the impression that they seriously think they can get away with no pay increase and very little in the way of additional overtime. If that's really what they're going to try to do--well, they've got a year. I don't think they'll be able to pull it off; it would require finding someone to do most of what I do now, and previous experience has shown that to be next to impossible, so it will probably be a moot point, and I'll wind up collecting my overtime.

MY COUNTRY

My country: the more I learn about it, the more I love it, and the more I fear for it. I wonder sometimes if others can really grasp just how much I love this country and its people. As absurd as they often are, I get the most tremendous joy out of them and I love them with a love inexpressible. So often, I have a feeling that I have somehow stumbled onto something very rare and precious, something of which I have tasted but a part.

Were it up to me, I would never see my country and people come to any harm and much of my thinking is devoted to how both can be sustained.

I am absolutely convinced that there are plenty of people, some of them in positions of power and influence, who would love nothing more than to see this country made over again into something unrecognizable, abandoning or destroying the things that have made it great in the process. These people are Jacobins in all but name. They have never really changed, no matter what labels they wear. They care nothing for the concepts and beliefs on which this country was founded, though they often make a great show of pretending to do so, unannouncedly and subtly changing the definitions of some of the words they use. One of the simplest, and most common ones, that they use (and one that has unfortunately been picked up by a great many well-meaning souls who don't really know any better) is "we." Very often, when they say, "we," as in,
"MOTW, don't you think that we ought to care for the poor?" what they actually mean is "Don't you think government ought to care for the poor?" That is a very different concept indeed, and in my opinion, the obfuscation is often intentional, the intent being to get your average American nodding his head to concepts that he and his fathers would never agree to, were they laid out in plain English. There are many other words and ways by which these modern Jacobins pretend to love the great American ideas whilst actually despising them.

I want to continue to learn, and to share my opinions, verbally and in writing, and to contribute to worthy candidates, organizations, and to evangelize and to pray. I want to be strong and to help others to be strong, for I am pretty well convinced that it is oxymoronic to conceive of a tyranny over a strong people. It has been said that a nation of sheep breeds a government of wolves--yet Christ refers to His followers as "sheep." Let me, then, do my part in making the sheep strong. Very strong.

I would like patriotic themes in the household decor, too.

FRIENDS

My friends will laugh to hear it, but it has been said that I don't have any friends! Well, I suppose I can understand this. At least, I could understand it coming from a stranger.

I have a few at church and there are more people at church that I'd like to cultivate. There are people who've moved beyond merely being clients to unquestionably being friends, people whom I cherish. There are people in my ESL class and the Hispanic Church that meets in our church building, whom I just love.

I must pause to note, for those foolish enough to believe that "conservative"= "racist," it is literally the case that I am on "hugging terms" with more Blacks and Mexicans than Whites.

There are also, of course, people whom I know exclusively through the blogosphere and Facebook but whom, for reasons of geography, I have never met in the flesh. They are nevertheless dear friends.

And then there are the friends that I have in the RyuTe Renmei. It is ridiculous to say that I have no friends. Such a remark could only come from someone who hasn't troubled to know me well.

On the other hand, it is true to say that I'm rarely in my friends' homes, and they are never in mine. This is something I'd like to correct. I'd love to have people over. It's just going to take more coordination and better housekeeping.

I'd especially like to have a few friends over for chess or go once in a while. Also, it might not be a bad thing to host an in-home Bible study.

MARINE CORPS

I was only in the USMCR for five years, but one of the wonderful things about joining the Marine Corps is that for the rest of your life, you are a "Former Marine." It's amazing how much respect former Marines are often accorded. People just assume that you're tough, even if you've got 15 extra pounds around the middle.

I haven't been in since 1989, but I will continue to display my old chevrons and "Rifle Expert" badge in a shadow box on the wall, and there will always be at least one Marine Corps t-shirt in my closet and a Marine Corps ring on my finger. And I will continue to shout, "Ooh-RAH!" when I think it appropriate!

BASEBALL

I picked up a small taste for baseball when Oldest Son was playing as a kid. Enough that I'd like to listen on the radio, and watch the playoffs, especially the World Series, but not enough to spend my entire summer sitting on my butt watching the Cardinals on cable TV. So I need better radio reception, for sure. And I need to make sure my calendar's reasonably clear when the playoffs start.

OSU FOOTBALL

Something else I'd like to keep up with via radio, but not television. I frankly don't give two hoots about football in general, but I like to keep up with the Cowboys, if for no other reason than they're not the Sooners.

Yick. I typed "Sooners." Gonna hafta burn mah keyboard.

LIVE THEATER

A small taste for live theater is something I picked up from Darling Daughter. I am pretty sure that now I want to see more of it, though not necessarily everything that's being put on everywhere in Tulsa. The student groups are not only fine, they are actually pretty good. I believe there is a site where I can keep up with Tulsa area theater, and I need to check it once a month and schedule some dates.

ANCESTRY

I know--seems like an odd thing to put in here, doesn't it?

It comes down to this: although I think of myself as an "American," it doesn't mean that I want to forget where I came from, my Scots-Irish background, part of which, according to my sister-in-law, goes back to an 11th century Scots king. So I'd like to complete a little more reading on that cultural milieu and incorporate some Scots-Irish elements into the home decor. Hopefully, my sister-in-law will eventually make her research available to the family (She hasn't yet, as far as I know. I hope I don't end up having to spend the money at Ancestry.com just to duplicate what she's already done.), I'd like to put that genealogy up on the wall, along with any coats-of-arms that may have been associated with the family throughout the centuries.

And I'd like, eventually, when funds allow, to do the same sort of thing for my wife's side of the family.

HEALTH

The more I read and the longer I continue in my current job, the more I grow convinced that most major health issues are in your own hands. Not all of them are, to be sure, but with the exception of cancer (and often not even that), most of what I see bedeviling the elderly can be prevented or mitigated with decent self-care--diet and exercise, mainly. That being the case, it seems acutely unfair to one's family and church not to at least try to take decent care of yourself. I want to be very consistent in proper cooking, diet, exercise, maintaining a healthy weight, and good sleeping habits, and I hope to have each family member follow suit.

DAILY/WEEKLY ROUTINE

Up at 5:00 AM. Take and record blood pressure and pulse. Strength and balance exercises, then RyuTe. Running three days a week. Start coffee. Bible reading and prayer time. Fix breakfast, get the kids up for it (if they aren't already up) and and we all whip out the dishes, and I get ready for work, which would include preparing our lunches. It probably also wouldn't be a bad idea, most days, to throw something in the crockpot, even if the only objective was to cook the meat for enchiladas in it.

Whilst getting ready for work, I check the e-mail accounts and the bank balance.

Then, work. Audio learning whilst driving, especially Spanish.

And then, of course, home. Most evenings, that should be something like this: In the evening--play my part in dinner prep, whether I am cooking or helping or headed for a church potluck. Reasonable house and yard maintenance, some gardening, especially with the kids, followed by a good book, then bed... Of course, this would be varied by what's going on at church, receiving guests, RyuTe classes, making a morning available for my parents once a month or so, and attending a go or chess club a couple of times a month. And I have to keep an eye on the local live theaters.

HOW TO GET THERE?

The problem, of course, is that life is currently in such a state of chaos and flux, and way-behind-ness that I can't even come close to actually doing this. What to do? Well, I think I can continue doing such parts of the morning routine as are under my control, for one thing. And I can do audio learning whilst driving, for sure. And for the next two to three months, I think I have to devote a LOT of time to getting my certifications done, because getting those done should ultimately generate enough cash to do a lot of the other things written herein. And as much home and car improvement as humanly possible before the cold weather sets in. And after that, continual work, making the starts that need to be started and moving as rapidly as possible toward implementing everything.

Frankly, I don't think what I've got here is that weird or unusual. Compared to what some people want to do in life, it's pretty tame. Rather a lot of folks would look at this and say that it's boring. There are other people involved, of course, including some that I haven't mentioned for one reason or another, certainly not because I want to leave anyone out of the discussion, such as it is, but there's the general framework.

Hey, this is me. This is how I want to live, if possible. Not to run roughshod over others, but if you want to know what I'm all about, here it is.

Republicans, Democrats, and Raaaaaaaaaaacism

2011-08-20T06:16:00.000-07:00

Every so often I have a series of encounters that forces me to take a step back for a moment, shake my head, and say, "MOTW, are you hearing what you think you're hearing? 'Cause it sure sounds crazy."

Of course, I am usually hearing exactly what I think I'm hearing, and if it's not crazy, it's borderline crazy.

From places here and there in the blogosphere and MSM, for example, I've been hearing the charge that Republicans are going to use, if I recall one writer's term correctly, "dogwhistle racism" against President Obama in 2012--that is, the charge is that Republicans are racist, oppose Barack Obama because of his race, and expect to win by luring knuckle-dragging, racist, redneck Republicans to the polls.

It's borderline crazy because it so neatly inverts the truth, and it's aggravating because some people actually fall for it.

I've written about racism before, and I recommend you go read that post before going on with this one. When you're back, I'll lightly sketch in the real history of Republicans, Democrats, and racism for you. I'm not going to bother to link to sources; I just flat don't want to take the time. But you can easily verify what I say here with a little digging, if you're willing to do it. If you're not willing to do it...

Oh, well.

Have you heard of Andrew Jackson? Oh, I know you've seen his face; it's on our money. But did you know he was the hero of the Battle of New Orleans? Did you know he was the only president every to see our national debt paid off? Did you know that he was also, in the words of a Democrat whose opinion I respect a lot, "a bigoted son of a -----?" That he oversaw the forced removal of the Cherokee and certain other tribes to Oklahoma? That he was the first Democrat president, and that one of the priorities of his Democratic Party was to preserve slavery in the South?

That's right: it wasn't the Republican Party that was born to champion slavery; that distinction belongs to the Democrats. The Republican Party was formed in large part to oppose slavery.

Think what you like of the issues involved in the Civil War. I won't pretend that the whole conflict can be reduced to slavery vs. anti-slavery. But I will tell you, and it is the truth, that during the Civil War and for decades and decades afterward, it was Republicans that championed liberty for blacks and Democrats that hindered it. I am speaking in broad terms, of course, and you can probably find exceptions on both sides, but in general, that is the truth of the matter.

The Ku Klux Klan, in its various incarnations? Democrats.

Lynchings? Democrats.

Cross-burnings? Democrats.

Suppression of the black vote? Democrats.

Discrimination against black workers? Democrats.

"Bull" Conner? Democrat.

Orval Faubus? Democrat

Virulent racist Woodrow Wilson? Democrat

Virulent racist Lyndon Johnson? Democrat

Robert "Sheets" Byrd, former Grand Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan? Democrat

For decades, the Democratic Party was the national bastion of American racism.

For decades, blacks voted--when they could vote, that is--Republican.

Martin Luther King? Republican. Go ahead, call him a racist. I dare you.

You don't really think that Democrats genuinely morphed from the racists' party to the champions of black equality in the few short years between Orval Faubus's Little Rock escapades to the Great Society, do you? You're not really that naive, are you?

Of course, Democrats didn't do any such thing. In the sixties, thanks largely to Republican efforts to secure equal access to the ballot box for black Americans, blacks became a voting bloc worth courting. And the Democrats courted them! In one of the most brazen, cynical turnarounds in political history, the Democrats re-branded themselves as the party of black rights, instituting entitlement programs largely aimed at buying and locking up the black vote, and painting Republican opposition to those programs, programs that have wrecked the black family, as racist. Amazingly, they have successfully painted Republican opposition to racial set-asides, racial quotas, as racist! They have painted anyone with the nerve to say that popular black culture is disintegrating and dragging blacks down as racist.

Democrats have rewritten history in the minds of most Americans. In a twisted sort of way, I have to salute them. It is one of the most amazing feats of re-branding, of successfully executing the "big lie" technique, in history. And they have done it all, successfully, for the sake of securing the votes of black voters, for the sake of raw, naked political power.

There are, of course, Republicans that Democrats have a hard time successfully tarring as racists: black Republicans like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, Star Parker, La Shawn Barber, Walter Williams, Condoleeza Rice, and the Filipina-by-heritage Michelle Malkin get a different treatment. They are not called racists; they are said to be sellouts, "Toms," and self-haters.

Some of the most blatantly racist political cartoons I've ever seen were directed at Condi Rice. You've probably forgotten.

I ain't never gonna forget.

The truth of the matter is that there is very little, if any, racism in the Republican Party. It is such a rarity that Democrats are darn hard pressed to come up with actual examples and are forever reduced to calling things racist when they aren't--things like welfare reform, or opposition to racial quotas. Or they'll out and out lie about someone being called racist names or spat on. Or they'll decide that a Republican's using "code words" to communicate with racists, or they'll selectively edit tapes to make someone appear to have said something racist when he hasn't. The truth of the matter is that the Democratic Party long ago decided that racial division was politically useful, and they've falsely tarred Republicans as racists ever since.

Christianity and Capitalism

2011-08-15T18:12:00.000-07:00

Every so often it is my distinct misfortune to read or hear someone wax eloquent about the evils of capitalism and imply, suggest, or say outright that Jesus was a socialist, or that He would have favored socialism, or that the early Christians practiced some form of socialism, or that capitalism somehow violates Christian teaching.

It's aggravating as the dickens. Aggravating because it reveals, at the least, appalling ignorance of history, economics, and the Scriptures; or worse, familiarity with one or more of those subjects combined with a serious deficiency in analytical thinking; or, worst of all, outright mendacity and lying. Combine this with the usual syrupy, dripping condescension that accompanies the commentary and you have a perfect recipe for annoying anyone who's devoted, say, 60 seconds of serious thought to the subject.

For what, exactly, is capitalism? It is often said that it is an economic system, but this really isn't the case. Capitalism, beloved, is nothing more--and nothing less--than the economics resulting from people--the mass of people, not merely elites--having both documented property rights and liberty. To the extent you deny the people liberty, or the right to administer their property and the fruits of their labor as they see fit, you depart from capitalism and pitch your tent in the Land of the Planned Economy, aka Socialism. Some prefer to deny those rights in toto; they are communists or socialists (Or fascists, for that matter. Surely you weren't unaware that fascism is but a variety of socialism?) Some prefer to deny them in part; they are liberals. Some prefer to deny them on an ad hoc basis as benefits them personally; they are political hacks, thieves, and liars.

Those who seek to guard and secure Man's God-given rights are commonly called "conservatives" these days.

It floors me that anyone even modestly familiar with Holy Writ would suggest that it does not recognize either the right to liberty or the right to property. How, if a man has not a right to life, do the Scriptures say, "Thou shalt do no murder"? And if a man has a right to life, how can anyone say that it is legitimate for another man to deny him the free use thereof, that is to say, to deny him his liberty? How can anyone be said to have a right to something if he has no right to control the disposition thereof? And if there is no right to property, how is it that the Scriptures say, "Thou shalt not steal," and "Let him who stole, steal no more?" How can any man steal what does not belong to anyone? The commands implicitly recognize the right to property.

And if the Scriptures recognize the rights to liberty and property, beloved, they recognize capitalism, for that is all that results when men have both!

These are amongst the rights the Founders of our country had in mind when they referred to certain unalienable rights granted from the Creator. Rights given by the Creator of mankind and which may therefore not be legitimately denied by men to men. It is largely the denial of such rights that constitutes injustice. Against this, the Scriptures warn us, and tell us that guarding against it is the proper role of the state. Hence, the Founders assertion that it is to secure such rights that governments are instituted among Men.

So much is obvious, as I said, to anyone willing to give the matter a few seconds of serious, analytical thought. I therefore do not hesitate to say that those who do not understand this have, at the least, simply not bothered to engage the material seriously. But there is more.

Consider, beloved, the track records of capitalism and the varieties of socialism. Capitalism has a track record of promoting liberty and economic growth and prosperity for masses of people. To this minute, it is the only economic--for lack of a better word, "system"--with a demonstrable track record of lifting millions of people out of poverty. (As an aside, the evils sometimes ascribed to capitalism are actually the evils resulting from greed, which usually results in the abuse or denial of property rights or liberty, and hence do not result from "capitalism" at all.) Socialism, on the other hand, especially when you consider that fascism and communism are but varieties thereof, has a track record of impoverishing and murdering hundreds of millions of people.

One is left shocked, stunned, in disbelief, at the notion that anyone could seriously suggest that a "system" that demonstrably lifts people out of slavery and destitution is somehow less charitable--and therefore less in accord with Christian beliefs--than a system that routinely enslaves, impoverishes, and murders people. But that is the position that people who take seriously the idea that Christianity is, or somehow should be, a socialist faith, are left with.

Ignorance can be cured. Here are some suggestions:

The Holy Bible
Money, Greed, and God
The Victory of Reason
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
The Wealth of Nations
The Mystery of Capital

Added One to the Blogroll

2011-08-13T16:38:00.000-07:00

Haven't added a blog in a long time. The new one is The Littlest Ninja which records the exploits of Sharon, who is the same lady that writes another blog on my blogroll, a food (foodie?) blog called The Good Life, as she studies kickboxing.

Simple Beef-Chub Chili

2011-08-06T18:25:00.000-07:00

This recipe started off as someone else's: I modified it from "Norma's Original Recipe Quick-n-Easy Chili," found in the pages of one of my favorite cookbooks in the whole world, the remarkable and inspiring The El Paso Chile Company's Texas Border Cookbook, which you desperately need to add to your collection. You needn't worry about cost; it is available used for a pittance. And yes, it is that good, at least if one of your big culinary ambitions is to cook really tasty Tex-Mex/Southwestern home cooking. I could absolutely live with that cookbook and just one other, Bill and Cheryl Jamison's Smoke and Spice. But enough of that.

As I believe I've mentioned before, I like to keep some 3-lb beef chubs from ALDI on hand. It is not quite as lean as ground chuck, coming in at 73% lean, but it has consistently proven to be pretty tasty stuff and at a very good price. Naturally, I gravitate to recipes that can use it or that can be adapted to it, and this was one of them.

It wasn't 'til last winter that I began making chili on a regular basis. The last time I'd made the stuff was five years ago when I won 3rd place in the "medium" category at a church chili cook-off, and that was with an entirely different recipe which I will likely not ever make again. This stuff, you can make all the time. It's relatively quick and relatively easy. If you can't make decent chili following this recipe, I'm not sure there is any hope for you.

Just kidding.

At any rate, the kids and I liked it so much that I began to hanker after a new piece of cooking equipment. Y'see, I had an old Dutch Oven, but it was only three quarts, and the recipe calls for a five-quart Dutch Oven, preferably a non-reactive, that is, enameled, one. After reading the reviews on Amazon, it was clear that the best available Dutch Ovens are from Le Creuset, and about a month or so ago, I finally ordered one at an unbelievable price. Not only has it proven the perfect chili-makin' vessel, it's rapidly proven itself the ideal vessel for other dishes as well.

Enough of that. Here's how to make this stuff:

First, brown the ground beef in the Dutch Oven over medium-ish heat. Whilst the beef is browning, chop a white onion, a big one. If you insist on a measurement, you're looking for two cups, but "one big white onion" works perfectly well. Don't know how to chop an onion? Let Chef Ramsay show you how.

Then drain the fat from the browned beef. My advice is: don't throw this stuff away. I know, I know: you've been told for decades that fat is bad, bad, bad--bad for your waistline, bad for your circulatory system, bad for everything. Sorry to burst your bubble, but when you look hard at the evidence, none of that turns out to be true! Get yourself, or borrow from the library, a copy of Fat and learn how to do something with those beef drippings. Your palate will thank you later.

Now, while the browned dead cow is draining into whatever sort of collection vessel you are using, take about two tablespoons of bacon fat--yes, bacon fat--and, covered, over medium-low heat in the Dutch Oven, cook the onions for about fifteen minutes, stirring two or three times. While the onions are cooking and the beef is draining, you might want to go ahead and open up your cans--you will need two 28-ounce cans of crushed tomatoes (the ones from Wal-Mart work just fine) and four 15.5-ounce cans of light red kidney beans. Have you tried Kuhn-Rikon can openers? They are da bomb.

Once the onions are done cooking, go ahead and add the beef back into the Dutch Oven and stir. Cover the Dutch Oven and let the onions and beef cook for five minutes or so. Then open it up and add 3 teaspoons of kosher salt, 1 teaspoon of ground cumin, 1 and 1/2 teaspoons of Wright's liquid smoke, and 3/4 cup of chili powder. The original is Gebhardt's, and I've no doubt it is a fine product, but I've been using the stuff from ALDI and it has been just fine. Sooner or later, I will probably try making my own chile puree and making chili with that, but this turns out quite tasty as it is, so I'm not in a big hurry. Stir everything up and cook for another five minutes or so, covered.

Now you will want to take your two cans of crushed tomatoes and one cup of beef stock and stir them into the pot. Turn the heat up to medium--I ought to mention that if you're using something besides a cast-iron Dutch Oven,you may have to make adjustments to my heat recommendations, as cast iron does a superlative job of heat retention, far exceeding that of most cooking materials--and cook, partially covered, stirring frequently, for about thirty minutes.

Finally, take the four cans of beans, one tablespoon of honey (you will find that if you give your tablespoon a quick spritz of cooking oil just before measuring the honey, the honey will slide right out), and one tablespoon of apple cider vinegar, add them to the pot, stir, cover, and cook for another five minutes or so.

I usually serve this with corn chips on the side and shredded cheddar cheese on top. Iced tea or a cold beverage from Sam Adams make perfect accompaniments.

I have found that this freezes very well, if you have too much to eat at one meal.

Pan-Fried Pork Sirloin Chops

2011-07-24T17:20:00.000-07:00

I fixed these up tonight, and as they've become a fairly regular item in the Man of the West household, I thought I'd share the recipe, such as it is, with others.

First, you need pork sirloin chops. In the discount grocery stores where I often shop, these are a pretty cheap, and, for pork, quite lean cut of meat. Too lean, really, for grilling or barbecuing, though I suppose that you could do it, especially if the meat were brined. But I digress.

Once you have the chops, however many you are going to cook, look them over. These things are frequently sold cut very thick, too thick to quickly cook without leaving the centers raw. So, to any of them that are thicker than, say, about three-quarters of an inch, takest thou thy really-really-really sharp chef's knife. Cut them as though you were going to butterfly them, that is, lay them out flat on your cutting board, and holding the knife parallel to the cutting board, cut the meat in half, that is, thinner (hope I've been clear!)

Then take some warm water, add kosher salt and apple cider vinegar (How much? Never measured it. The simplest answer is "a lot.") and let your chops soak in the mixture for at least an hour.

Toward the end of the soaking time, take a cast-iron skillet and heat it to medium-high. Put at least half an inch of lard (lard will not hurt you!) or soybean oil or something in the pan and allow the oil to get good and hot. While the oil's getting hot, take some flour and throw in some chili powder (Say a prayer of thanks for Mr. Gebhardt's invention!) and garlic powder to taste. Add some fresh-ground black pepper, too, if you like.

Dredge the pork pieces in the flour mixture and fry them up, three or so minutes on each side, longer if you prefer ~~to have all the glorious goodness God put in pork cooked right out of it~~ your meat really well done. Drain on paper towels and serve with vegetables, or with mayo and pickles to make some tasty fried pork sandwiches.

Really easy, really cheap (these chops are forever being put on sale), really tasty. What the heck more can you ask for?

Beef-Chub Shepherd's Pie

2011-07-03T13:56:00.000-07:00

I first learned to make Shepherd's Pie from my fire-fighter stepfather (he called it "Sheepherder's Pie"), and it wasn't exactly a formal process. I have modified the recipe each time I have made it, which hasn't been often, because, with a family of six, you need a big honkin' vessel in which to cook it, and I didn't really have anything perfectly suitable. That has now changed, as I am now the proud owner of a 5.5-quart enameled Dutch Oven, and the second day I had it, I thought, "There's the solution to my Shepherd's Pie problem." Here is what I did, together with some commentary on things here and there.

First, you will need something about 5.5 or 6 quarts in capacity that will withstand an oven temperature of 325 degrees. You will want to preheat the oven before starting to brown the beef.

Now, takest thou thy 3-pound beef chub--I generally have some frozen beef chubs from ALDI on hand. They are labeled 73 percent lean, 27 percent fat, and they have been consistently good, and at a good price--and let it thaw. The smart way to do this is to put it in the fridge the night before, but you can do it quicker by putting it in the sink and letting a thin stream of cool water run over it for a while. Then brown it. I did it over medium heat--and use a colander to drain off the fat. It is not that I am afraid of dietary fat, not at all, but I object to having so much of it in a finished dish that the rest of the food is swimming in it. You will want to add 1 teaspoon of kosher salt and 1 teaspoon of liquid smoke per pound--that is, three teaspoons each, total.

About liquid smoke. You may be wondering just what the heck liquid smoke is. Well, it's not something cooked up in a lab. It's very simple. Have you ever seen people smoking a hookah, or a water pipe? Experienced pipe smokers--I used to be one--know that the purpose of the water is to cool off the smoke, and the pipe does indeed deliver very cool smoke to the smoker. However, much of the flavor is lost, trapped in the water as the smoke bubbles through it. Liquid smoke is made much the same way: hickory smoke is bubbled through water, which traps much of the flavor, and the water is then reduced to a concentration suitable for home cooking. It is real smoke flavor, in teaspoon form. I use Wright's: the only flavor, as far as I know, is hickory, but there is nothing else in it, no artificial colors or anything like that. Other brands I have
looked at have other stuff in them.

Now, as the meat is browning, you will also want to have about three pounds or so of sliced potatoes boiling. The experts tell me that russet potatoes are best for mashing, but my family, for whatever reason, has a definite preference for the flavor of red potatoes, so that's what I use, skins and all. When the potatoes are done cooking, throw in a stick of butter and whip 'em up with your mixer. No hay problemo.

Once the meat's brown, drain the fat, like I said, and toss in--well, I don't actually have a hard-and-fast rule. When my stepfather first taught me how to make this, he always threw in "vegetable beef" soup, but mi esposa has a hard time with the peas that come in that, so over the years, I have tried different things. This time, I threw in about 3/4 pound of string beans, a can of creamed corn, and three 10 3/4 oz cans of Campbell's "Golden Mushroom" soup. I am sure that you could use beef stock, reconstituted dried mushrooms, perhaps a dash of soy sauce or worcestershire, or red wine, perhaps some sauteed onions or bell peppers--whatever floats your boat.

Then spread the mashed potatoes out over the top of the beef mixture, and throw--in this case--a 3/4-pound bag of shredded cheddar on top, the sharper, the better. Then put the lid on your dutch oven (It will be almost full by this time) and put it in your pre-heated oven for 25 minutes.

Dinner is served. We polished off almost the whole thing in one sitting.

The Perfect Church

2011-07-03T10:27:00.000-07:00

This is a still-in-development part of a much larger post I'm working on. There might be a couple of people who might find it interesting.

I belong to a church in the heart of Tulsa, a church that you could describe as "big," in the sense that the physical plant is pretty big, and "average" in that the total attendance on Sunday morning is about average for most Southern Baptist churches, which is to say, about 200 or so. It is a church like so many in this part of Tulsa, like a very great many across the country, really. It's dying. Most of the churches in the heart of Tulsa are graying and thinning out and they are dying.

Some of them used to be among the fastest-growing and largest congregations in the country.

What happened?

Well, there are a lot of things that have happened. I am still learning about some of it But one of the things, I am convinced, is that transportation and ease of communication are actually working against the neighborhood church.

If you go to a seminar, or have a workshop on church growth, one of the things you will find out is that a church's natural territory--at least in a city, I don't know about in the countryside--is considered to be everything within about a three-mile radius.

Couple that with the fact--at least I think it's a fact--that the majority of people hear about Jesus from a friend or a relative.

Then ask yourself if you, or any of your friends and relatives, live within a three-mile radius of your church. If you go to an older church, in an older part of the city, I think it is likely you are going to say, "No!"

People can drive--so they, or their children, move out to other parts of town and if they're so inclined, they can still attend the old church they've always attended, but their friends, their relatives, their lives, are all outside that three-mile radius around their church. Naturally, it then becomes very, very difficult for the church members to reach the people around the church! Nobody should be surprised. Nothing could be more natural.

Some people are going to home churches or things like that and I see nothing wrong with that, if that's what you want to do, except that I think that it tends to reinforce a certain cliquishness in some cases, that is, I think there is a pretty good likelihood that you are going to get all eggheads in one group, all the emotionistas in another, and so forth, and that's not altogether good.

And then there's the bad teaching--not in my church, actually, I think our pastor is pretty good (critics would say that he appeals to "eggheads" like moi), one of the few left that actually does expository preaching, and he's not inclined to dumb things down--but it seems to me like there's almost an active contempt rampant in the North American church, a contempt for any sort of teaching that goes beyond the very basics. I will never forget asking my then-teenaged oldest son what the problem with Adult Sunday School lessons was, and he immediately shot back with, "It's the kids' lessons, only with bigger words." If you question this, in most churches and most Sunday School departments, you will be told that the material cannot be made too complex or we will alienate visitors, completely overlooking the fact that visitors are not exactly overrunning the building. And then, if you are not already a teacher of some kind, you will be told that you know so much, you ought to be teaching!

No thought will be given to the possibility that most visitors are not so stupid as to be unable to figure out when their intelligence has been insulted.

In my opinion, the teaching in most churches in North America is execrable. I do not even have to go to them to see in order to have a pretty good idea. Why? Well, just ask around. For example, how many Christians do you know that feel confident in their ability to clearly articulate the Gospel? In my experience--and yes, I have asked--most Christians don't feel terribly confident in their ability to clearly articulate the Gospel, or to answer questions and objections, and more often than not, they don't even try (I believe the stats indicate that something less than 10 percent of all Christians will ever share their faith with strangers).

They just keep coming to Sunday School and church services, hoping all the while, I guess, that they will eventually gain enough knowledge to be able to tell other people what they believe about God, life, death, eternity, and salvation. To my mind, the situation looks like a massive, systemic failure to educate and train, despite a massive Sunday School program and the availability of enough literature to choke a moose. It doesn't help that a lot of people seem to like it that way. It amazes me how many people say they're afraid to share the Gospel, on the grounds that they don't know enough to answer objections, and then won't come to a Sunday School class heavily geared to equipping people to explain and defend their beliefs.

What to do? How to keep my church and others like it from dying? Well, I envision building a church like this:

On Sunday mornings, first, in Sunday School, we'd tackle whatever subjects the class was interested in pursuing in depth, getting people involved in the discussion and accustomed to discussing and defending what they believed. Then we'd have a service where the Gospel was preached, the text of Scripture was expounded, and Christ exalted. Then there'd be a potluck lunch, and maybe a softball game, or maybe some indoor games (chess or go, anyone?). Then everyone'd go home for a nap, and come back at night for more preaching, teaching, and prayer, maybe followed by some sandwiches (Potluck sandwiches. If you try to make the church responsible for the sandwiches, it'll just create a burden that nobody wants to bear).

I have to say a word about "worship," or, more specifically, about music.

Worship is an absolute joke in most churches, at least most churches I've been to--including ours. That is not to say the music is, quote-unquote, "bad." Often, the music minister and musicians and choir are very capable.

But that is not corporate worship. In all the years I've been going to Baptist churches, I have seen precisely one man I would call a worship leader, in that he always managed to get everybody in the sanctuary singing their hearts out. Most music ministers, together with most choirs, are not leading worship. They are performing for the congregation. That is not right at all.

A worship leader needs to be far more concerned about leading the congregation in corporate worship than about how he and the choir sound.

Monday night'd be visitation. Not like most churches, where "visitation" means visiting people who should've been removed from the rolls years before, or visiting people that brought their kids to the "Fall Festival" five years in a row (that kind of stuff is, in my experience, a complete waste of time), but visiting, first, the members who couldn't be at church due to illness or frailty, those who are having a hard time in one way or another (I am as convinced as I can be that one of the modern church's problems is that we have so emphasized ministry to the community that we have let our ministry to our members slacken. This should not be. Paul suggested strongly that we should tend to the brethren first), and then just going door-to-door in the neighborhood, asking people how we could pray for them, and sharing the Gospel where the Lord opens the door. I would suggest strongly that the same people not do visitation every week, not unless they feel truly compelled. Rather, a whole bunch of people should rotate visitation duties. Nobody should be allowed to become overwhelmed.

Tuesday nights, the clubs would meet. As I mentioned in the section on RyuTe, someday I'd love to teach a class at the church. I picture an energetic, sweaty class, where the emphasis is on health and self-defense, not fighting, not aggression, with maybe just enough free-sparring thrown in to satisfy those that want to compete in an occasional tournament (Tournament fighting is useless for self-defense, but some people find them a lot of fun). There could, and should, be other clubs--whatever people were interested in. Maybe Praisemoves for some. Maybe Pilates. Maybe a homeschooling support group. The point is to have neighborhood Christian people with a common interest be able to satisfy that interest and desire for fellowship through the neighborhood church, not so much to use those activities to attract lost people to the church--although, God knows, you wouldn't want to turn lost people away from those clubs, and you'd certainly want lost people taught the Gospel while they're at the church.

Wednesday nights'd be for discipleship training and prayer. Classes on all sorts of stuff, from in-depth study of various books of the Bible, to home economics (we all need to know how to stretch a dollar, folks), to New Testament Greek. Classes'd be preceded by a potluck meal and followed by a prayer session.

I think that's the way church oughta be. And very frankly, I think in our case, we need to seriously consider merging with the Hispanic church that meets in our building. They are actually growing, in part, I think, because so many Hispanic families have moved into the neighborhood, and, like I said, people do hear about Jesus from their friends and neighbors.

Many times I think the ideal is to have a little church like this in every neighborhood, with the social life of the whole neighborhood revolving around it. I'm about half-convinced that when we got to the point where you had to drive to church instead of walk (or ride your horse), it allowed us to be too darn selective about who we'd associate with. Being able to drive--I've run across people that drive thirty or more miles to church, folks--well, it seems to me that it makes it easier to ignore the people who are right around us, in favor of people that we find it easier to love. Why would we not expect our neighborhood churches to be dying if we refuse to attend the neighborhood church? And conversely, I can't help but think that if the people and their neighborhood church get all wrapped up in Jesus Christ and in one another, both the churches and the people will quit dying.

That's what, in part, I'm working on for the future. I may die before I see it fully realized. But that's the direction I'm headed.

Nothing Like a Certain Someone's Kyusho

2011-06-04T16:33:00.000-07:00

I suspect anyone interested will know immediately to whom I am referring, and a handful may know what put the subject into my head.

For the one or two people out there wondering, yes, I have a Certain Someone's books, have read them, and I am also studying Taika Oyata's RyuTe under a seventh dan who has been with the system for something like thirty years.

If you're wondering, no, what I have been taught and/or have seen in RyuTe is, I do not hesitate to say, nothing like a Certain Someone's kyusho.

There it is, for what it's worth. People wanting more of what I think about the subject are advised to search Openhand's blog for "kyusho" and "kyusho-jitsu" (or "kyusho-jutsu"--can't remember how he spells it). He says it better than I do anyhow.

A Breathtaking Power Grab by the President

2011-05-21T05:36:00.000-07:00

I was unfortunately not surprised when I read that the President has asserted that he need not comply with the War Powers Resolution as regards Libya because of our "limited" role, but it nevertheless took my breath away. Look at this:

In an effort to satisfy those arguing he needs to seek congressional authorization to continue US military activity in accordance with the War Powers Resolution, President Obama wrote a letter to congressional leaders this afternoon suggesting that the role is now so “limited” he does not need to seek congressional approval.

“Since April 4,” the president wrote, “U.S. participation has consisted of: (1) non-kinetic support to the NATO-led operation, including intelligence, logistical support, and search and rescue assistance; (2) aircraft that have assisted in the suppression and destruction of air defenses in support of the no-fly zone; and (3) since April 23, precision strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles against a limited set of clearly defined targets in support of the NATO-led coalition's efforts.”

A senior administration official told ABC News that the letter is intended to describe “a narrow US effort that is intermittent and principally an effort to support to support the ongoing NATO-led and UN-authorized civilian support mission and no fly zone.”

“The US role is one of support,” the official said, “and the kinetic pieces of that are intermittent.”

From the beginning of the U.S. military intervention in Libya, the Obama administration has cited the 1973 War Powers Act as the legal basis of its ability to conduct military activities for 60 days without first seeking a declaration of war from Congress. The military intervention started on March 19; Congress was notified on March 21. Those 60 days expire today.

You understand what that means? You know what the administration means by "intermittent" pieces of "kinetic" support? You know what "suppression and destruction of air defenses" are? You know what "precision strikes" are?

They are acts of war.

The president of the United States has just asserted authority to engage in acts of war in defiance of the War Powers Resolution. It is nothing less than a breathtaking usurpation of congressional authority by the executive branch. Do not be deceived by the assertion that "limited" involvement means the War Powers Resolution--and more importantly, the Constitution--do not imply. This is the old story about the camel getting his nose under the tent. The definition of "limited" will simply be expanded as needed, once the precedent is set. The nation can now be taken to war on the say-so of one man, whether Congress declares war or not, War Powers Resolution or no War Powers Resolution. No possible reading of the Constitution or any reading of the Founders can support this. It was never intended for it to be possible for one man to make a decision taking the country to war.

Congress, for its own sake, needs to take action to nip this in the bud right away or it will find itself emasculated. This is not a Republican or Democratic thing; this is a separation-of-powers thing. The president is attempting to usurp Congressional prerogatives and he must not be allowed to get away with it.

An Old Patch On An Old Uniform

2011-04-30T12:47:00.000-07:00

A very old patch on a very old uniform, as a matter of fact. But God willing, sometime in the next few years, I hope to show that God isn't done with this patch yet.

This was the patch my teacher used, back in the days when he was healthy enough to teach outside his home.

My Brain is Full

2011-04-18T06:08:00.000-07:00

I went to one of Taika Seiyu Oyata's seminars over the weekend. I enjoyed myself thoroughly, but could not escape the feeling throughout the seminar that I was an utterly uncoordinated idiot, quite unable to walk and chew gum at the same time.

All I was trying to do was learn a new exercise. You wouldn't think it would be that hard. I think I've got it, that is, I think I can execute the movements in the correct order. Haltingly and at a glacial pace, perhaps, but I think I can do it. Perhaps in a week I won't look like Frankenstein's monster whilst I do it.

This seems to be one of the benefits to training in RyuTe. You WILL, via some very considerable challenges to your physical coordination, forge new neural pathways. As some consider that sort of thing one of the means by which you avoid age-related mental deterioration, that is a good thing.

A note: if you, as a practitioner of some other martial art, had happened to be in a roomful of RyuTe yudansha on Friday night, and had you known no better, it is my bet that there is no way on God's green earth you would have identified what they were doing as Okinawan karate. It is increasingly hard for me to read people's commentaries on "karate" without thinking to myself, "But there is no way that you've seen 'karate,' at least 'karate' as it was 150 years ago." I'm very serious. What you are seeing as "karate" and what Taika Oyata is teaching his students are different. The surface appearance may be similar, but the underlying reality is very different indeed.

Self-Defense: It's Not Just a Freakin' Hobby

2011-04-04T02:00:00.000-07:00

More than a few times, I have read people pontificating on why they study martial arts. Some will tell you that they study to cope with stress, for physical fitness, for the cultural aspects, for the mental/spiritual effects, and so forth. Those are all valid reasons, too, and I don't wish to denigrate them, and yet...

It's amazing to me how many people study martial arts and are apparently utterly unconcerned (or else outright delusional--as in the case of people who study "martial arts" but spend most of their time on point sparring and so forth) about their applicability in real-world self-defense situations. It's like they just don't see a need to prepare themselves for conflict. It's like they think martial arts is a hobby, like tap or jazz dance, or ballet, or golf.

It's not. At least, it's not intended to be.

Let me suggest to you, if it hasn't occurred to you already, that you live in a world where people will cheerfully threaten you over your political views, as described by the father of one young lady, emphasis mine:

Kristen wrote this editorial (No thanks, Mrs. Obama ..) for her high school newspaper in February of this year. After the article was published, she underwent attacks from African-American students, parents, local church groups, and members of the community. She was called a racist, threatened with a knife, attacked verbally and physically in the hallways at school, and her vehicle tires were slashed in the school parking lot. Members of some local minority organizations even met to discuss how to retaliate against her and a boycott of her school newspaper was launched.

If you're interested, I believe that this is the text of article she wrote.

You live in a world where, through no fault of your own, you may, like a co-worker of mine, wind up the object of some drug-addled, bi-polar weirdo's obsession.

You live in a world where someday, they may be coming for you...

and you may find it vitally necessary to be able to break the grips of people attempting to take you somewhere you don't want to go, or to put a man on the ground with one technique.

And so many of you just don't seem to care. Frankly, you people freak me out.

More About Interpreting Food Labels

2011-03-29T02:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, as another object lesson, here's the ingredients for another drink, one very popular, at least 'round here, where--amazingly, to my mind--moms often buy it for their kids under the mistaken impression that it's like buying their kids "juice." Remember, by law, ingredients are listed in descending order. Whatever is listed first is what there is the most of, okay?

Water

Corn syrup

2% or less of each of the following: concentrated juices (orange, tangerine, apple, lime, grapefruit)

citric acid

malic acid

ascorbic acid (vitamin C)

thiamin hydrochloride (vitamine B1)

Natural flavors

modified cornstarch

canola oil

sodium citrate

cellulose gum

sucralose

sodium hexametaphosphate

potassium sorbate to protect flavor

yellow #5

Yellow #6

Mmmm, mmmm, MMMMMMM!!!!!! Doesn't that sound yummy? Well, maybe to the uninitiated. Let's talk. First of all, let's see if we can't put everything--the amount of everything--in perspective. Look at that third line. Isn't that telling you that except for water and corn syrup--to which we'll get back in a minute--none of the ingredients make up more than two percent of the drink? Sure looks that way to me. So, being very generous, let's assume that there's two percent of everything, which would be ludicrous, nobody's going to make a drink that's 2 percent vitamin B1, right?

Still...there are fifteen ingredients after water and corn syrup, so that's a maximum of thirty percent, meaning that, at minimum, this tasty beverage is seventy percent water and corn syrup. The reality is that hardly any of those fifteen ingredients is likely to amount to even one percent of the total volume of liquid, so it's really much more likely that this stuff is 85 or ninety percent water and corn syrup, and that's being generous. It might be 95 percent or even more.

Now, that's bad, right off the bat. The water's not bad, of course, but corn syrup...

Corn syrup deserves a special circle in culinary Hell. It is a sweetener, obviously made from corn, and it is cheap, partly because the growing of corn is federally subsidized. It is a nutritional nightmare. If you deliberately wanted to make yourself fatter than--well, fat--and wreak havoc with your insulin mechanism, this is one of the means by which you would choose to do it. It is vicious, nasty stuff, not something you want to put in your body if you can reasonably avoid it.

So, right off the bat, just after the first two ingredients, you can tell you're basically drinking sugar water. Yummy.

Concentrated fruit juices? Okay. That might not be so bad. You just have no clue how much you're getting here. Remember, it's two percent or less. Could be next to nothing.

Citric acid and malic acid? Added to give the drink that citrus-y tartness.

Vitamin C? Very cheap to make. Putting it in the drink allows them to put "Vitamin C!" on the label, which makes the ignorant feel like they're buying their kids something healthy. Same thing with the B1.

Natural flavors? What the heck is that?

Cornstarch. Anyone who's done a reasonable amount of cooking knows what the cornstarch is there for. It's a thickener, so that this concoction pours out of the bottle more like juice and less like water. It's also starch, that is, it'll fatten you.

Canola oil? There are some scare stories circulating about canola oil. As far as I'm concerned, it's just oil, probably added here to improve texture.

Sodium citrate? More tartness.

Cellulose gum? Added to improve texture. Remember, they want this stuff to look like juice.

Sucralose? Basically chlorinated table sugar. It's an artificial sweetener. Like having a bucketload of corn syrup in it didn't make it sweet enough already.

Sodium hexametaphosphate: in all honesty, I have no idea why this is in here. It has a variety of uses, one of which is apparently as a water softener!

Potassium sorbate: a preservative.

Yellow #5 and Yellow #6: artificial colors, fairly obviously added to make this sugar water look more "orange-y."

And there you have it. The bulk of the story is told in the first three lines. It's basically sugar water with a few cheaply-made vitamins and flavorings and some gunk to make it pour more like juice. Practically guaranteed to make you and your kids fatter than you ever wanted to think about, at least if you drink it on a regular basis. Drink this stuff regularly, and you can pretty much bet on fighting obesity, and maybe someday, heart disease and diabetes, too!

The pitiful part is that you can buy this stuff for about 2.75/gallon, and you can get Wal-Mart reconstituted orange juice for about 3.25/gallon. You'd put up with crap like this to save fifty cents?

Let's Learn How to Interpret a Dang Ingredients Label, Shall We?

2011-03-28T05:46:00.000-07:00

Of course we shall. I have repeatedly been struck by the number of people that think they're eating or drinking something good for them, but are actually consuming utter garbage, and I am convinced that often it's because they either have not looked at the label or have no idea what it means. So let's take a look, at, say, the label for a certain popular, allegedly healthy drink, which shall remain nameless except that I've got a family member that thinks it's the bomb. I have to admit that I don't have a bottle of the stuff in front of me, but I did read the ingredients label last time we had some in the house, so I swiped the following from a website elsewhere once I recognized it. I'd link, but that would involve identifying the drink, and I'm more interested in learnin' ya somethin'.

Filtered water
Concentrated Fruit juices (pineapple and mango)
Malic Acid
Concentrated Purple Carrot Juice (Color)
Natural Flavor
Acesulfame-Potassium
Sucralose

There is also a separate part of the label that shows "medicinal ingredients":

41mcg Chromium Polynicotinate
137mg Vitamin C (Ascorbic Acid)
450mg Garcinia Cambogia Rind Extract

Okay, the first thing you need to know is that by federal law, an ingredients label lists ingredients in descending order, that is, whatever's listed first is what it has the most of, and so forth.

What's listed first on this "healthy" drink?

Oh, that would be "water." More water than anything else.

Then "concentrated fruit juices." How much? You don't know, do you? But I would suggest to you that anything that pours out of the bottle with the consistency of water, as this drink and so many like it do, doesn't actually have a boatload of fruit juice in it. I mean, you've seen fruit juice pour out of a bottle, haven't you? Looks a little bit thicker than water, doesn't it? This stuff ain't like that. It's very thin. Probably not much fruit juice in there.

Then there's "Malic Acid." It does occur naturally, but bank on it, when it's added to food, it's being done so that it has a tartness to it. How do I know? Simple. Googled it.

Then there's a little bit of color. How much does it take to color a bottle of what is almost certainly mostly water? Probably not much.

Then there's "natural flavor." What the heck does that mean? No one knows!

Then there's Acesulfame-Potassium. You thought it was some sort of vitamin or mineral additive, didn't you? 'Cause it said "potassium?" Got ya. This is a sweetener. It is abundantly sweeter than regular sugar, but apparently there hasn't been all that much testing done on it. Again, how do I know? Googled it.

Then there's sucralose. What the heck is that? Mmmmm--basically chlorinated table sugar.

Okay, so far, we've figured out that this stuff is basically heavily diluted fruit juice with some "natural flavor" and artifiical sweeteners. Remember, they're marketing this stuff as somehow being healthy. What makes it healthy? The diluted fruit juice? The coloring? The tartness? The "natural flavor?" The artificial sweeteners?

Probably not. Maybe it's the "medicinal ingredients?"

What the heck is the chromium polynicotinate doing in there? Well, apparently chromium is supposed to play a role in carbohydrate and fat metabolism, and some people think it might help you lose weight. The science is inconclusive, to say the least, and if you're trying to lose weight, I'd suggest that you focus heavily on what this guy has to say instead of trying to do it by adding more chromium to your diet than your body is likely to be able to use.

Now: vitamin c, or ascorbic acid. 137 mg of the stuff. Well, vitamin c is good, isn't it? True dat. It's also cheap, which makes it popular with people trying to make their products sound healthy. 137 mg is also about what you would get eating two cups of cantaloupe. Now, let me ask you: do you really think that God designed your body to need the amount of vitamin C you get in two cups of cantaloupe every time you drink a bottled beverage? Probably not? I would certainly suggest not. And since what vitamin C your body doesn't absorb exits your body pretty quickly, this is, frankly, pretty much a waste of space. The only reason it's there is to sucker you into thinking you're drinking a vitamin pill.

Okay, what the heck is the last thing, garcinia cambogia rind extract? An alleged appetite suppressant, that's what it is. Saying that appetite suppressants are probably not the best way to lose weight is understating the matter considerably.

And you're paying a buck and a half per bottle for this stuff at the convenience store? In the name of health?

Cheez louise. Develop some curiousity and learn how to read a label. Consider this an introductory lesson.

Another YouTube Naihanchi Tour

2011-03-24T04:51:00.000-07:00

In this one, I put together some of the video dealing with Naihanchi applications, instead of just performance.

Now, a caveat: I am not going to comment on the appropriateness, effectiveness, or silliness--whatever the case may be--of any set of these applications. Nor am I going to say anything like, "This is similar to what we do in RyuTe." Even if there are surface appearances of similarity between some of the applications in these videos and some of the applications I have seen in RyuTe, there are likely to be minor differences, and those minor differences are often more critical than you might think at first glance. For example--although this doesn't have anything to do per se with Naihanchi--I once kept trying to duplicate a movement I'd seen Taika do on one of his tapes, a movement drawn from Pinan Shodan. I just couldn't reliably get the movement to work on my eldest son, who is noticeably stronger than I am. So I asked my teacher about it and when he saw what I was doing, he immediately said, "Oh, you're missing the nerve strike."

Nerve strike? I didn't see any nerve strike on the tape. Well, turns out it's a subtle-looking, scraping sort of thing that doesn't leap out at you when you see it. You have to be looking for it--but once you know how to do it, the movement works very nicely.

At any rate, I don't want to give anyone the impression that if they get good at some of these applications, they have somehow absorbed some RyuTe into their repertoire.

I would say that the applications shown here are not even close to being exhaustive. I have certainly not seen every possible application of the Naihanchi movements, let alone practiced them. Doing so would be the work of years.

Shoot, this isn't even an exhaustive selection of the bunkai videos on this kata. There were lots more to look at, but I was pretty sure that most people wouldn't even play this many.

Y'know, Choki Motobu was said to know only a handful of kata at most. I seem to recall reading that at least one writer said he knew only Naihanchi. Well, if true, it's no drawback. The reality is that Naihanchi Shodan alone contains enough material that the mastery thereof might well occupy a lifetime.

I know that a lot of you don't believe that, or at least are having a hard time accepting it. I don't blame you. All you see is the 45 seconds or so of movement. You haven't seen different timings, you haven't seen what my instructor called "Naihanchi turnaround," you haven't seen how the stepping motions work, the incredible number of uses to which those "double blocks" can be put, and so forth.

Oh well. I won't lose any sleep over your refusal to believe it. In the meantime, enjoy the clips!

Shoot, let's stop there. There are actually many more clips available on YouTube. If I had linked to them all, you would be here all day...

A YouTube Tour of Naihanchi Shodan

2011-03-20T14:48:00.000-07:00

Well, as the estimable Dr. Parker has been dwelling on Naihanchi, and as Openhand has offered a few words on the subject,, it's kind of on my mind. I thought that I would proffer up a bit of a tour as to the kata, at least in terms of various performances.

First, I should note that if there is up-to-date video anywhere on the web of any of the Naihanchi kata as they are being taught in RyuTe, I am unaware of it. Anyone seriously interested in learning about Naihanchi would do well, I think, to order the videos from the RyuTe Renmei. They will, as far as I know, sell them to anyone. You should be aware that the applications shown in those videos only scratch the surface. On the other hand, they should give you at least a little insight. You certainly won't find the money wasted.

That being said, here is video of (so I gather) a student of a former student of Taika Oyata performing Naihanchi Shodan.

There are, of course, about a bajillion different Shorin Ryu organizations out there. Here is a performance by Onaga Michiko:

Chosin Chibana:

Matsubayashi Ryu:

Shito Ryu:

Shotokan (Funakoshi Gichin):

Shotokan (Kanazawa Hirokazu):

Shorinji Ryu:

Wado Ryu:

Kyokushinkai:

Lastly, I have to include a version of Naihanchi Sandan, as this is, according to my own teacher, my best kata. I have to admit that I like it a lot. This version, of course, is not quite like the RyuTe version, but it should give you the flavor of the thing.

Well, that wasn't actually "lastly." I do have one additional thought for you. It's out of my own head and no one else should be blamed for it.

You know those cross-body "punches" you saw in the videos? Well, they can be things other than punches, of course, but the reality is that you can, in fact, smack the crap out of someone with one of those. I have hit the makiwara with them more than a few times, and boy howdy! Does it go!

What's more interesting yet is that if I change stances and hit the makiwara from any other position after having done it in horse stance, I find that the power in my punches is noticeably enhanced. I really do think that Naihanchi helps you learn to subtly recruit punching power from disparate parts of the body.

Just my two cents, of course.

Openhand on MMA

2011-02-27T05:40:00.000-08:00

This was just too entertaining not to quote. I have made a couple of small edits for language. Not that I haven't heard it all before--I've been in the Corps, y'know--but there are some that come here that would just as soon avoid it.

I keep reading Blog's, that “tip-toe” around the whole MMA issue, and frankly I'm sick of it. These individual's are skilled “sports” figures. They are by no means skilled combatants. If you watch one of these matches, note that every one of them, is in prime physical condition. They're young, strong and full of ---- and vinegar. ALL, notable attributes for a “sporting” contestant. I would defy you to take any of them, at age 45 or older, and see if anything (that they presently do in this MMA ----) even works for them at that time. When you can present to me, multiple 70+ year old practitioner’s of any of this MMA (or related) trash, that's even able to do it (much less force any of it to work) then maybe I'll consider bestowing any respect towards it. The difference being (between that tripe, and what I practice) is that I have an example to aspire towards. Granted, he isn't 70 year's old (he's freakin' 83 year's old!), but I would definitely feel more confident knowing what he knows, compared to anything that these MMA/ground-fighting/what-ever mook’s are selling.

Truthfully, most people that I know have hardly any interest in martial arts at all, so they basically don't listen to me ramble on about it, but once in a while, very rarely, someone will ask me why I insist that RyuTe is different from what they have come to know as "karate."

I always point first to myself (48 years old, about 200 pounds, of which only about 15 is excess, in tolerably decent shape, that is, resting pulse rate usually about 66 bpm, blood pressure good) and then to my instructor (62 years old, probably no more than 160 pounds, weak from the ongoing therapy to completely eliminate a cancer, on oxygen, only about 30 percent lung capacity) and note that, yes, he can make the techniques work on me. No hay problemo. You do not need to be Hoss Cartwright to make this system work.

If that doesn't get your attention, I don't know what will.

The 83-year-old to whom Openhand refers, if you didn't already know, is Taika Seiyu Oyata.

Are Catholics Christians?

2011-02-24T02:00:00.000-08:00

I just read/skimmed a post and comments wherein a Baptist preacher was being royally torched for, among other things, having taught that Catholics aren't Christians, and characterizing Catholics as "cult members."

It kind of interested me that no one really contested the torching, and it was a Baptist blog. Time was that most Baptists would tell you that Catholics weren't Christians, but things have changed. I have had Sunday School class members tell me, just directly out and out tell me in class, that Catholics were Christians.

That's quite a change. You have to wonder what happened. Let me see if I can suggest a possibility or two.

One thing is that I am certain, dead certain, that hardly any Baptists, and precious few Catholics, actually know what official Roman Catholic doctrine is. That may sound like an absurd thing to say, especially about the Catholics, but I am totally convinced it is true. Over the years, I have repeatedly had the experience of asking people--sometimes whole classrooms of people--to tell me exactly what the differences between Baptists and Methodists are, or between Baptists and Catholics. Only once or twice has someone even come close on either count. I long ago grew convinced that your average modern Southern Baptist knows virtually nothing of doctrine other than "Jesus saves" and that it is "by grace through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God," and "faith without works is dead." Not that they haven't heard more doctrine than that, but there is a heap of difference between having heard something, even repeatedly, and knowing it.

Now, you might think that that is just those dumb ol' Southern Baptists and that the Catholics are more knowledgeable, but I wouldn't bet on it, not if I were you. I have had the experience of talking to a lady--a lady who attended, I think, Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church--whilst her car was being washed during one of our outreach events. My job was to talk to people who stopped by to get their cars washed, and as I talked to this lady, I kept saying things that I knew from my reading went directly counter to official Roman doctrine. To my complete and utter shock, she agreed with every single thing I said! "That's what we believe, too," she kept saying.

To appreciate how significant that was to me, you have to understand that it's not like I haven't read anything about the Reformation! I've read Luther's The Bondage of the Will and part of his Commentary on Galatians, both of which spoke directly against Catholic doctrine. I've read some of Calvin. I've read a pretty fair amount of what James White has to say about Catholicism. I've read books by other authors on the subject, the names of which I cannot recall right now. I've read--or at least I am pretty sure I recall reading--The Council of Trent, wherein the Roman Church specifically anathematized a number of protestant doctrines. I know that Trent has never been recanted. I know the Roman Catholic doctrine on Scripture and Tradition, on the veneration of Saints, on justification, on the interpretive authority of the Magisterium, on the Mass, on the Eucharist, and so forth. I know, and I'm telling you, that the Reformation was not over simple miscommunication!

The heart of the gospel itself was at stake--but the lady I was talking to sure as thunder didn't know it. I had to conclude that either she was lying to me, or she--and maybe the bulk of the people in her church, too--simply didn't know what the official doctrine of their denomination was.

What on earth could have caused that?

A few years later, I found out about something--something in addition to the general doctrinal ignorance prevailing in these times--that might be part of the explanation. It seems that quite a number of years ago the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (the BGEAs) started working with Catholic churches in their crusades. This move got the BGEAs royally torched by more Baptists than you might think; it was seen as serious doctrinal compromise. But this is the thing: in order for a Catholic church to participate in a BGEAs crusade, it had to agree to use BGEAs material, which is pretty standard Southern Baptist stuff, and which takes a good month or more to get through. So there were lots of people going to these crusades, and yes, some of them went to Catholic churches afterward, but they were getting, for several weeks, Protestant doctrine.

(At this point, somebody who believes in the "trail of blood" stuff will up and say, "But MOTW, Baptists aren't protestants!" Look, save it for now, ok? I'll get to the Trail of Blood another day.)

At any rate, to my mind, when you've had Catholic churches all across the country teaching Southern Baptist doctrine as part of the crusade "deal" for decades, you shouldn't be shocked that a lot of American Catholics no longer know what official Catholic doctrine is.

I've often pointed out to people that Martin Luther did not leave the Roman Catholic church. They kicked him out. Was he a non-Christian right up 'til the time he got kicked out, and then a Christian thereafter? It seems absurd, but that is kind of where you have to go if you automatically assume that Catholics aren't Christians.

The upshot is this: if you compare official Roman Catholic doctrine with the text of the Bible, it is clear, very clear, that Roman doctrine conflicts with what the Bible says at a number of key points, including the gospel itself. I do not believe that the official doctrine of Rome is the saving doctrine of the Bible--BUT I am quite convinced that despite attendance at Mass, despite liturgy, and so forth, rather a lot of American Catholics simply do not know what their church's doctrine actually is. Shoot, their local priest may not believe Rome's official doctrine!

You just have to talk to people on a case-by-case basis. Some have their faith in Christ and Christ alone, and some have their faith in the Catholic church and a mixture of faith and their own works. You don't know 'til you talk to 'em.

Inflated Ideas About Your Martial Art?

2011-02-18T15:24:00.000-08:00

I really wanted to include some video here...

See, I was in Oklahoma City today, and coming out of one of my clients' driveways, I saw a vehicle that had a web address written across the back window, a web address for a martial arts club.

I am so trying to be circumspect and non-offensive here...

At any rate, I recognized the name of the system. I've read a little bit about it and the man who started teaching it in this country. Every time I've read anything about it, the websites touting it focused on its "brutality," "extreme efficiency," and so forth. It is not a "sport," or even a "martial art," they say, it is a "combat art." It is "well-rounded," not like Judo, which is just throwing, or Karate, which is just punching and kicking (so they say on these sites).

Well, naturally, I was curious, and I visited the OKC site. Same boilerplate material, so I went to YouTube, and sure enough, I found video from that very school. Some demonstrative material, and some material from someone's brown belt test.

Now, I am not trying to be hypercritical, nor do I want to make it sound as though I'm really in a position to judge things. God knows I'm no grandmaster...

BUT...

I have seen a thing or two...

What I saw on those videos, frankly, was nothing that you wouldn't see in a lot of Americanized JuJutsu classes, or some American Kenpo classes. Not that this is necessarily bad. I'm just saying that I didn't see anything in those videos that would justify all the hype as regards the alleged exceptional brutality and efficiency of the system under discussion.

And one other thing: these people were clearly play-acting, that is, the attackers were visibly cooperating with the defender, to the point where I am confident that many of the techniques might well not have worked had the "attacker" been serious.

Now, you do want cooperation when you are starting to learn a technique. But eventually, at least sometimes, you want to see if you can actually make your techniques work on a resisting opponent, don't you? You do have to be careful. Some of these techniques can dislocate or break joints and so forth, and I'm not advocating that you backfist someone in the temple to make sure it works. But you don't want to always have your partner totally cooperating, either. That seems like a sure-fire way to acquire an inflated idea of your technique's effectiveness.

To sum up: most of us like to believe we practice the roughest, toughest form of self-defense known to mankind, or, if we don't already practice something, that's the stuff we'd like to seek out, right? But just because someone tells you that they practice badmammajamma-jutsu, the most "brutal, efficient, combat art" in the universe, don't necessarily make it so. You just might want to bring your capacity for objective thought to this subject.

Why Scientific "Consensus" Means So Little

2011-02-18T05:28:00.000-08:00

Anyone familiar with the subject will not find the following material from the prologue to Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease unfamiliar:

...the argument can be made that, to fully understand obesity alone, researchers should have a working familiarity with the literature in clinical treatment of obesity in humans, body-weight regulation in animals, mammalian reproduction, endocrinology, metabolism, anthropology, exercise physiology, and perhaps human psychology, not to mention having a critical understanding and familiarity with the nuances of clinical trials and observational epidemiology. Most researchers and clinicians barely have time to read the journals in their own subspecialty or sub-sub-specialty, let alone the dozens of significant journals that cover the other disciplines involved. This is a primary reason why the relevant science is plagued with misconceptions propagated about some of the most basic notions. Researchers will be suitably scientific and critical when addressing the limitations of their own experiments, and then will cite something as gospel because that's what they were taught in medical school, however many years earlier, or because they read it in The New England Journal of Medicine. Speculations, assumptions, and erroneous interpretations of the evidence then become truth by virtue of constant repetition.

By "the subject," of course, I did not mean the study of obesity. That just happens to be the example discussed. By "the subject," I meant scientific "consensus."

Look, I'm fairly familiar with bright, well-educated people. I spent years in Mensa before I got tired of it (When I was first a member, it was fascinating. People from all walks of life and with all sorts of interests were involved. Now--at least last time I tried it--nobody attends the meetings without spending the whole time talking about computers.); my family is just chock-full of them. Radiologists, engineers, lawyers, and so forth.

I know bright people. I mean, I know how they think, how they act, and so forth. And I will tell you wholeheartedly that as a rule, if you get them off "their" subject(s), they don't know any more than the next man.

Seriously.

Just for example, I've got an uncle who is really quite a high-level electrical engineer. I mean, this guy's tops, flies back and forth to Europe with some regularity because Nokia uses him as a consultant. One time, I was discussing taxation with him, and got to discussing the Fair Tax in particular. As I was explaining the subject, it gradually became clear that a fair amount of it just wasn't registering, and eventually he said, "I really don't know much about economics."

Of course he doesn't. He doesn't have time. He's flying back and forth to Europe, for goodness sake, to consult with Nokia. Who has time to read The Fair Tax Book?

Now, I know economics is one of the soft sciences at best, but you take my point. Highly specialized personnel often--remarkably often--do not know as much about things in general as you think they do. More often than you might think, when they say something, they are relying on information that they either half-remember, or don't fully understand, or haven't checked out in detail.

When someone says, "Scientists say," or refers to the "scientific consensus," take it with a grain of salt.

Way Past Time to Defend the West

2011-02-16T05:37:00.000-08:00

I'll just let these snips from the American Thinker pass without commentary save for the emphasis, which is mine. I'm allegedly trying to get ready for work.

Europe finally appears to be waking up to the dangers of multiculturalism. Last October German Chancellor Angela Merkel confessed that multiculturalism was "a total failure" and British Prime Minister David Cameron more recently agreed, even linking "state multiculturalism" to Islamic terrorism. French President Nicolas Sarkozy is the latest to join this chorus...

[snip]

Chancellor Merkel, Prime Minister Cameron and President Sarkozy, among many others, misdiagnose the problem. All speak as if cultural/ethnic separatism were the chief culprit. Not entirely true.

[snip]

The problem is boiling hatred of the west and a willingness to pursue this hatred, not physical or cultural separatism per se. Lack of cultural assimilation does not breed terrorism; rather, the urge to destroy the host

nation impedes assimilation.

[snip]

So, if assimilation campaigns are incomplete answers, where does the counter-attack begin? It begins by identifying the toxin that lies at the heart of multiculturalism -- the dogmatic belief that all cultures are equally "valid" and worthy for believers, a view construing culture as a choice no different than preferring vanilla over pistachio at the local Baskin Robbins. Rejecting this equivalence of cultures is a change for us, not them -- Islamic fanatics hardly embrace cultural relativism. It is this wooly-headed cultural relativism permeating the west that permits the triumph of zealots against those who barely lift a finger to protect their own culture. The battle is a mismatch if one side refuses to defend forcefully its own heritage.

[snip]

This understanding means that we must be free to defend our values as superior and this inescapably means offending our enemies.

[snip]

These politically incorrect statements send a powerful message: we are no longer afraid to offend when protecting the west and so the days of politely looking the other way are over. Moreover, we will not be intimidated if called racists, right-wing-Nazis extremist and all the rest. If you feel that you can't live among "racist Nazis," return home. Ironically, this strategy mimics the "in-your-face" militant gay liberation movement -- we're here and we're Queer, get used to it.

To repeat, being terrified of the "racist" label," the refusal to defend one's own civilization so as not to offend those who hate us only emboldens the miscreants. Who wants to assimilate to a civilization too scared to defend itself?

Doug Giles on English Multiculturalism

2011-02-14T02:00:00.000-08:00

Dougie always has a way of putting things:

Who would have imagined that letting religious gangsters immigrate to the U.K. (who happen to loathe British values, have zero desire to assimilate into the mix, and believe England’s laws suck and Sharia is simply fabulous) would have turned out bad? Who saw that coming?

I’ll tell you who saw that coming: Stevie Wonder, all myopic Cyclopes far and wide, and everyone in Europe who has a lick of common sense and a functioning BS detector. However, when these seers began to perceive the erosion of their life and values thirty years ago and when they started speaking out that these Muslims who “long to join” the British melting pot were not, in fact, melting but rather ruining the whole damn stew with their radical nonsense, they were immediately shouted down as xenophobes by the altruistic multiculties.

Yes, though it once seemed cute and cosmopolitan to have people from all over the Middle East speaking different languages, serving different foods, wearing burkas and playing different music, it has now turned ugly with Islamic enclaves completely at odds with British culture. And make no mistake about it: This Islamic hate came right in through the front door riding on the back of Kumbayah multiculturalism, and now merry old England is scary new England...

Hmmm. Merkel back in the Fall, and the Dutch sometime before that, if memory serves; Cameron just a few weeks ago, and now, recently, Sarkozy. All of 'em saying that multiculturalism has failed.

But does that bother us Americans? Aw, heck, no! Darn the torpedoes, full speed ahead...

Red Fork's Emily Knocks One Out of the Park

2011-02-13T17:54:00.000-08:00

Inadvertently proving that reactionary old conservatives (like moi) and relatively liberal-ish folks (like Emily) CAN find points of agreement, she writes:

...I am sick to death of this ludicrous notion that Tulsa would suddenly become the Magic Kingdom, with a soaring economy, a zero-percent unemployment rate, and choirs of angels floating above its gold-paved streets, if only we could provide more entertainment for unmarried twentysomethings.

Amen, an' amen!

Now, I don't know that she would necessarily go to the same place I am about to go, but from where I sit...

...well, I've been living in this city for the overwhelming majority of my life. My ancestors on both sides of the family, to the very best of my knowledge, have been in Oklahoma since before the War of Northern Aggression. After suffering the humiliating misfortune of being born in ~~a Godforsaken hole~~ an Arkansas military hospital, I spent a year in France, and then a year or so in Wisconsin, and then wound up in Broken Arrow for several years. Since the age of eleven, except for Marine Corps boot camp and duties, I have resided in Tulsa.

I remember when I used to go down to the grocery store and buy a candy bar and pay--to the best of my recollection--four cents of sales tax per dollar of sales. Just call me crazy, but I seem to recall that there was a fire department, that there was a police department, there were roads, and there weren't bizarre homeless people everywhere. There weren't sick little old ladies bein' thrown out onto the streets or any other such thing.

Over the years, we have added a penny here, a penny there, a ha'penny there, and so forth, until we are now paying darn near ten cents on the dollar in sales taxes. And so help me if every darn cent of it wasn't "sold" on the premise that it was an "investment" that would draw in new blood and new business by virtue of improving something, ANYTHING, but streets, fire, and police! Well, okay, some of it was ostensibly supposed to accomplish certain "investments" in the streets themselves, as though we weren't supposed to notice that the sales taxes we were ALREADY paying were supposed to be, in part, for that, and it wasn't getting done, and the tax was supposed to be "temporary," which only a DURNFOOL would believe, NO tax is ever "temporary," there's always war, death, and murder involved in either in repealing one or in letting it die a natural death. Over and OVER and OVER again, it was "Let's tax ourselves to do X, which will draw people in, and they will spend money, and that way we'll get the sales taxes to do streets, fire, police, and so forth."

I've been hearin' that stuff all my LIFE an' it ain't never happened as promised YET.

When I started hearin' it about downtown, I darn near threw up. Them yokels wanted me to believe that by building some dadgum arena downtown, "business" would be revitalized downtown and the whole cotton-pickin' city would somehow magically be reborn as a utopian metropolis--with good roads, too!

Well, "business," if by "business," you mean "bars and restaurants" did spring up downtown, an' I ain't knockin' it. But I have noticed and continue to notice that the rest of the city continues on in much the same fashion it has for the 37 of my years that I have lived in it. The "build a bunch of watering holes downtown approach" has, from my perspective, been a distinct failure as regards most of the city.

And yet every stinkin' time I turn around, there's some other yahoo out there seems to think that if ONLY we had a few more places to wet one's whistle, then Tulsa would be an okay place to live.

Heck with THAT. Been there, done that, it ain't worth a tinker's...ah...cuss.

Just my two cents, written in a hurry. Hope it didn't ruffle no feathers too much.

It Wasn't Always This Way

2011-02-12T18:59:00.000-08:00

I'm not sayin' a word about the rest of the post from which this line comes--I gots my 'pinions, y'know, but I ain't gonna take the time ta lay 'em out tonight--but this line kind of caught my attention:

...a church system that exists primarily to pay professional ministers and to build and maintain buildings.

Hmmm.

Hmmm.

Hmmm.

Y'know, it's kinda hard to dispute.

I don't have a problem with paying ministers. The Bible does actually say, you know, that preachers are entitled to get their living from preaching the Gospel, and I don't begrudge that one little bit. But is that the reason that the "church system" exists? To pay ministers?

To build and maintain buildings?

Well, I know those aren't supposed to be the reasons, but looking at what actually goes on in a lot of churches and para-church organizations might make you wonder.

Look at the Southern Baptist Convention. You know the reason it was formed, and what it was formed from? It was formed from a lot of Baptist churches--independent, every one of 'em--that wanted to have a means to cooperatively support missionaries and seminary education for preachers.

Looking at the SBC today, churches don't seem quite as independent as they used to be--or at least, as I've read they used to be. I really, strongly get the sense that the organization that was meant to be a tool for accomplishing the goals of the churches now sees the churches as tools for accomplishing the goals of the organization.

But maybe that's just me. And truth be known, the solution is always available: the people in the pews can always educate themselves and get involved. If they don't--

--well, they've no one to blame but themselves.

Republicans, Tariffs, "Free Trade," and Economics in an Easy-to-Understand Nutshell

2011-02-11T05:36:00.000-08:00

The estimable Pat Buchanan writes:

As for “protectionism,” Harding did approve the Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act of 1922, doubling rates to 38 percent. But he also slashed Woodrow Wilson’s income tax rates by two-thirds, back to 25 percent.

Result: Unemployment, 12 percent when Harding took office, was 3 percent when Calvin Coolidge left. Manufacturing output rose 64 percent in the Roaring Twenties. Between 1923 and 1927, U.S. growth was 7 percent a year. At decade’s end, America produced 42 percent of the world’s goods.

Compare this economic triumph with the fruits of W’s free-trade policy that wiped out 6 million U.S. manufacturing jobs, one of every three we had, and put America in hock to China.

The protectionism Bush calls “evil” was the policy of 12 Republican presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Coolidge, who made the GOP America’s Party and converted this country into the industrial marvel of mankind.

Is Bush oblivious to this? Did someone at Phillips Academy, Yale or Harvard Business School tell him Lincoln, William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt were free-traders?

Now, don't waste my time pointing out the negatives of tariffs. Of course there are negatives. Every kind of tax has negatives. Income taxes have negatives, too. I am only contending, as always, that on balance, tariffs are better than income taxes. I think the track record is there.

Just How Much Can You Get Wrong and Still Be a Christian?

2011-02-08T21:45:00.000-08:00

Shortly after I got saved, I heard one of our church deacons say--I'm afraid I can't remember the context--that we didn't have to have perfect understanding of all the Bible in order to be saved, and that was a good thing, as otherwise we'd all be in trouble.

I have thought of those words many times since then. I thought of them last night. You see, I just read a post, and skimmed/read the comments thereon, that reminded me of them. I rather got the impression that a pretty fair number of folks in the Christian blogosphere have come to the point where they are seriously ready to say that anyone who doesn't publicly denounce a person who's made certain doctrinal errors as a false teacher or a heretic is himself a false teacher or a heretic.

Now, before I go on, let me say that Scripture, in the main, is not that hard to understand, and the main--principle--points of doctrine are really quite unequivocal, and that THERE ARE points beyond which a person cannot go and still be considered a Christian. To deny the bodily resurrection of Christ, for example, is one of those points. To deny that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone, is another. Those are what one blogger--I almost hesitate to mention his name, so controversial is he in some circles--Wade Burleson, might call "primary" doctrines. Those are doctrines that one cannot simultaneously deny and be said to be holding to the Christian faith.

But there are other doctrines, what Burleson and others might refer to as secondary or tertiary doctrines, which, while important and certainly worth the effort of getting right, the denial or misunderstanding of which would not necessarily be an indication of a person having left the Christian faith. Problems--to say the least!--arise when some folks act as though every doctrine is primary, as though a deficiency in understanding about mode and timing of baptism or poor reasoning about the nature of "filthy talking" is enough to make one a false teacher or an apostate.

Sometimes issues arise when people just make mistakes, or are taken out of context. I have read, in the dim and distant past, some people say, for example, that Martin Luther taught justification by works, that is, that it was necessary, in order to be saved, that a person get certain sacraments right. I will admit that I have not read Luther exhaustively--actually, all I have read is his The Bondage of the Will and part of his Commentary on Galatians, but in those, Luther's insistence that salvation is by grace alone, that it is all of God and none of man, that man's works are of absolutely no avail when it comes to salvation, comes across so clearly that I can't help but think that people who are willing to say that Luther was a heretic who taught works-salvation have seized on some of his words to the exclusion of others and greatly mistaken his meaning.

I get the impression that there are bloggers out there who would separate from a preacher if he shared a stage with Martin Luther, or if he, not possessing exhaustive knowledge of every jot and tittle of some other preacher's doctrinal irregularities, generously assumed that the other preacher wasn't a heretic until it was definitively proved otherwise. I would suggest that when you have gotten to this point, you have gone a little bit too far.

Amen, an' Amen, and Yet Another Amen

2011-02-07T02:00:00.000-08:00

Via Kat.

Boy, howdy, did I like this one. It was with difficulty that I refrained from quoting the whole thing. Emphasis in the original:

...despite the fact that he (McCain) was as much a Washington insider as any of them, YOU decided that he was "electable."

So YOU nominated him.

And YOU found out that he wasn't "electable" at all.

Now along comes a gal who says and does everything right. One who walks the path of Ronald Reagan. One who never wavers from her conservative principles. One who doesn't give a damn what the Washington establishment thinks of her. One who shares - and champions - your values. One who is willing to suffer the slings and arrows - attacks of the most pernicious kind - willing to pursue YOUR goals with headheld high and steady determination in her voice - so as to make this country of ours a better place.

And what do you do?

Run in fear.

I read things like this and I get so angry:
"I like her enthusiasm and ability [to] energize people," said one woman.

"Would you support her for president?"

"Well, we're more Mitt Romney people."

"I like her," says one man. "I'm not sure she's presidential, but she gets the message out."

"Could she become presidential?"

"Hell, if Obama can be president, so can she."

"We like her personally, but can she win?" said another woman. "We're very worried. She's been so demonized."
My God.

You are nothing but frightened children. You don't deserve her.

Ask yourself: Who made the determination that Sarah Palin isn't "presidential" while Mitt Romney is? I'll answer for you: The same people who "so demonized" her. And you accept that? You let the likes of ChrisMatthews and Katie Couric determine for you whether she can run this country? Do they also change your diaper?

I'd tell y'all more about what I think about Sarah Palin, 'cept that you've heard it all before.

The American Thinker on Roe and the Constitution

2011-02-01T02:00:00.000-08:00

I think I can pretty much let this stand without commentary. Wouldn't hurt ya none to go read the whole thing, though:

From a constitutional perspective, moral arguments are irrelevant. Properly understood, the abortion question is a matter of federalism. Our Constitution lays out a governmental framework that is really quite simple. The powers of the national government are enumerated in Article 1, Sec. 8. The Tenth Amendment then tells us that any power not enumerated as a federal power (or prohibited by the Bill of Rights) is reserved for the states. This includes a wide range of state regulatory powers (known as "police powers") which include authority over many moral and social issues. For example, the Constitution does not mention prostitution; therefore, it is a question for the states to decide according to their own local morals. The state of Nevada has chosen to legalize prostitution; forty-nine other states have chosen to outlaw it.

The same logic should be applicable to abortion -- and it was, prior to Roe. By 1973, four states had legalized abortion, and forty-six others had restricted it. But the Supreme Court decided that it was going to ram abortion down the nation's throat, whether it had constitutional justification to do so or not. The end result was a train wreck of an opinion. Conservatives who oppose Roe ought not speak about it in hushed moral tones, but rather with derisive hoots, jeers, and catcalls. The decision is intellectually fraudulent, and anyone who takes it seriously reveals his own intellectual insolvency.

[snip]

Roe is so bad it makes other controversial decisions -- like Plessy v. Ferguson or Dred Scott -- look like models of Solomonic wisdom by comparison. In those cases, the Court was clearly biased, but it at least made an attempt to pay lip service to the Constitution.

What Roe revealed about our modern political elites is this: they simply do not give a damn what the Constitution does or does not say, and they know they can get away with ignoring it. The specious type of "reasoning" in Roe ultimately leads to Nancy Pelosi snarling incredulously, "Are you serious? Are you serious?" when asked by a reporter how the Constitution justifies ObamaCare; it leads to Justice Kennedy citing
the European Court of Human Rights when declaring that the Constitution guarantees the right to anal sex; and it leads to Justice Breyer quoting the Supreme Court of Zimbabwe.

When our courts fail to heed the actual text of the Constitution they are supposedly applying and replace it with inane drivel about "the Ephesian, Soranos" and with foreign law, one is forced to conclude that we no longer live in a constitutional republic, but in a dictatorship of the judiciary -- where reading the "supreme Law of the Land" on the floor of the House is a controversial event.

James Madison must be rolling in his grave.

Well, actually, come to think of it, there's one thing I feel compelled to add, for the sake of those who sneer at those who take the Tenth Amendment seriously, or those who think the General Welfare clause authorizes the federal government to do 'most anything: at least take a gander at an opposing view, okay? Before you comment on this post? It might save you from looking a complete fool.

Reorienting National Defense

2011-01-31T02:00:00.000-08:00

I suppose I ought to mention that I read the The American Conservative's blog principally because Pat Buchanan started the magazine. I often don't find the opinions of the various bloggers there all that impressive. Often, I get the distinct impression that they really do think that the only true conservatives in the universe reside within their own small community. I am not saying that they simply disagree at various points with the Tea Partiers, with the Neocons, with establishment Republicans, with laundry-list conservatives, and so forth. It appears to go rather deeper than that, into a sneering condescension toward anyone who doesn't agree with them lock, stock, and barrel. (Now, as an aside, I am dead certain someone out there is going to say to themselves, "But you do that too, Man of the West!" I am sure that it appears so, especially when I talk about Neocons, whom I will scarcely concede to be conservatives at all. But I do try, genuinely, to remember that if I am going to insist that every conservative agree with me on every point, ultimately I am going to be the only conservative left in the room. Conservatism, in my opinion, is more of an attitude and an approach to things than it is a list of positions, and it is inevitable that conservatives will disagree with each other on some points. I accept that. I often get the impression that the folks at The American Conservative do not. Okay?)

On the other hand, they do make some good points and are useful in that you can count on them to point out weaknesses in the thinking of anyone potentially running for president, and God knows all the candidates have some weaknesses.

One in particular, in my opinion, is that rather a lot of conservatives have kind of jumped the shark when it comes to our military and national defense.

Don't get the wrong idea: I'm a former Marine (five years a Marine Corps Reservist) and have an abiding love for the American military, and I think the number-one job of the federal government is national defense. No question about it. Nor do I have a problem with taking the fight to the jihadist wing of an enormous death cult, i.e., with the "War on Terror." I do, however, think it's delusional to make policy and war on the assumptions that we can and should democratize the world, and I do think it is ridiculous that we still have troops in Korea more than fifty years after hostilities ended, that we have troops in Europe when modern Europe is quite capable of funding its own defenses, and so forth and so on.

I'm pretty sure that the United States has more than enough money, manpower, and technology to successfully defend the United States, which is its business, and also pretty sure that fruitlessly trying to be the world's peacekeeper/cop will ultimately lead to nothing good. I had to agree, on the whole, with this observation:

Tea Partiers cannot accomplish what they wish for unless they tackle the “military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower spoke about. A small federal government does not carry 17 intelligence agencies. If they mean what they say, then Tea Partiers will demand that defense expenditures be reduced, U.S. overseas commitments ended, bases closed, and foreign policy changed to reflect fiscal realities.

I don't know that overall defense expenditures need to be reduced, though that may well be possible. But they certainly need to be heavily reoriented.

Go Ahead, Just Read All the Crap You Want

2011-01-26T02:00:00.000-08:00

Every so often, I read something in the blogosphere that just inflames me.

It just floors me. What do people read?

Crap. Crap, crap, and more crap. Crappity-crap-crap. In a world filled with non-fiction that you really need to read--The Federalist Papers spring immediately to mind--and finely-crafted works of fiction and poetry, stuff that will inform you, enlighten you, civilize you, and uplift you, people continually devote their lives to the collection of and reading of utter crap.

And these people expect to be taken seriously.

God forbid I should do any such thing, Sonny Boy. Ain't gonna happen.

Gunfighting Tips from the Old West

2011-01-25T02:00:00.000-08:00

A Cowboy sitting in a saloon one Saturday night, he recognized an elderly man standing at the bar who, in his day, had the reputation of being the fastest gun in the West.

The young cowboy took a place next to the old-timer, bought him a drink and told him the story of his great ambition. 'Do you think you could give me some tips?' he asked.

The old man looked him up and down and said, 'Well, for one thing, you're wearing your gun too high. Tie the holster a little lower down on your leg.'

'Will that make me a better gunfighter?' asked the young man.

'Sure will,' replied the old-timer.

The young man did as he was told, stood up, whipped out his 44 and shot the bow tie off the piano player. 'That's terrific!' said the hot shot.. 'Got any more tips for me?'

'Yep,' said the old man. 'Cut a notch out of your holster where the hammer hits it. That'll give you a smoother draw'.

'Will that make me a better gunfighter?' asked the younger man.

'You bet it will, ' said the old-timer.

The young man took out his knife, cut the notch, stood up, drew his gun in a blur, and then shot a cuff-link off the piano player.

'Wow!' exclaimed the cowboy 'I'm learnin' somethin' here. Got any more tips?'

The old man pointed to a large can in a corner. 'See that axle grease over there? Coat your gun with it.'

The young man went over to the can and smeared some of the grease on the barrel of his gun.

'No,' said the old-timer, 'I mean smear it all over the gun, handle and all.'

'Will that make me a better gunfighter?' asked the young man.

'No,' said the old-timer, 'but when Wyatt Earp gets done playing the piano, he's gonna shove that gun where the sun don't shine, and it won't hurt near as much.'

Sent to me by one of my relatives, of course.

John Fricke Lays It Out for You

2011-01-24T02:00:00.000-08:00

Just in case you were wondering what the rules were:

Attack words

- "Socialist" -- Socialist is an attack word. It is used only for the reason of falsely smearing an opponent.

- "Marxist" - Marxist is an attack word. Worse than 'socialist' and used only for the reason of falsely smearing an opponent.

- "Unpatriotic" -- Unpatriotic is an attack word. It is used only to falsely smear an opponent.

- "Patriotic" -- Patriotic is an attack word used to marginalize opponents by attempting to falsely claim you have the nation's best interests at heart.

- "Terrorist" -- Terrorist is an attack word used to marginalize individuals or groups, even those guilty of terroristic acts.

- "God, Jesus, Bible, et al" -- Attack words used to force moral certainties onto people for nefarious reasons.

- "America" -- America is an attack word because it implies America is not guilty of horrific crimes against humanity.

- "Target, Battle, Fight, Crosshairs, et al" -- All war language is classified as attack language. Except for the word "attack" which is descriptive only for citing attack words.

Non-attack words

- "Racist" -- Racist is not an attack word. It is a descriptive word used to protect racial and ethnic minorities from harm. Even if it is almost exclusively used falsely.

- "Homophobic" -- Homophobic is not an attack word. It is a descriptive word used to protect sexual minorities from harm.

- "Islamophobic" -- Islamophbobic is not an attack word. It is a descriptive word used to protect one particular religious minority from harm.

- "Sexist" -- Sexist is not an attack word. It is used to protect a gender majority from harm.

- "Intolerant" -- Intolerant is not an attack word. It is used to promote tolerance of all views, except those intolerant ones that tolerance can not tolerate.

- "Xenophobic" -- Xenophobic is not an attack word. It is used to show proof that any view of America as the world's greatest nation is intolerant, racist, sexist, homophobic and most notably at the moment, Islamophobic.

- "Wingnut, Nutball" -- Not attack words if used properly to describe the mental state of opponents, clarified by facts presented in the media.

- "Teabaggers" -- Teabagger is not an attack word. It is used to describe intolerant winguts and nutballs.

- "White Trash, Hillbilly, Redneck" -- Not attack words if used properly to describe the facts of an opponents looks or positions.

On Helping the "Homeless"

2011-01-23T02:00:00.000-08:00

I almost never give people on streetcorners money. Almost without exception, I turn down the folks in the Wal-Mart parking lot who are "stranded," "out of gas," and so forth. I have, on one occasion (coming out of a grocery store, actually), offered to buy food for a man who said he hadn't eaten in three days, only to have him refuse, as he just wanted the money.

People have said I'm uncharitable. I respond that, no, I'm just not thick as a brick. There is a huge difference between charity and allowing yourself to be used to avoid work, or looking for work, or reconciling with your family, cleaning yourself up to the point of employability, and so forth. Dan Phillips makes the point well:

...helping the disadvantaged is one thing, and a good Christian thing it is. But enabling the wantonly irresponsible wastrels who pock-mark the streets of this prosperous, aid-riddled land is another, and I see no moral imperative for it.

Okay, at this point, you might question "prosperous," especially in some parts of the country. But I still have little patience for obviously able-bodied people who can't trouble themselves to so much as trim their beards, or who prefer to spend hours a day standing on street corners instead of looking for work.

It doesn't help that I have a darn good visual memory, and recognize "homeless" people who stand on this corner, and then, later in the day, get off the bus on that corner, or people who have been hitting up the customers at the local Wal-Mart for years, telling different sob stories each time, or "homeless" people who show up on certain street corners only on the weekends, or the people who "don't know anyone in Tulsa," but nevertheless manage to call someone local (on a borrowed cell phone!) for a ride, and so forth.

Some people have just come to realize that, as long as they can qualify for section 8 housing, or flop on the floor somewhere, they can pick up enough money for cigarettes and a Quik Trip hot dog just by standing on the street corners and looking pathetic. To my mind, you might as well give heroin to an addict as give money to such people.

I'm Pretty Sure Romney's Bein' Groomed

2011-01-22T18:28:00.000-08:00

Groomed for the Republican nomination, that is, and if he's nominated, it will be a big mistake. Not that he hasn't got a chance of winning. About half the electorate's so disgusted with Obama, and Obama's lost the support of so many of the independents he had in the last race, that darn near any Republican will have a good shot at beating him.

(Yes, o ye of the leftist persuasion, I know he's up in the polls lately. He will be a little bit up after the SOTU, too. It won't last. He will be up a bit from time to time and down a bit from time to time, but the "grace period" that a lot of people were prepared to grant him has expired. No one expects him to be any different from any other politician anymore. Obamacare is still definitely down in the polls, and half the country thinks we're headed in the wrong direction. People want spending cuts. As Obama is forced to defend Obamacare again and again and again, and as he continues to try to spend us into oblivion, his numbers will go down again. Make no mistake, he is definitely beatable.)

I say it will be a mistake because Romney's not fundamentally different. The differences between Romney and Obama appear to me to be differences of degree, not of kind. You can't forget Romneycare and its unholy fiscal results. You can't forget that Romneycare pioneered the individual mandate. I have no reason to believe that Mitt Romney knows and understands and cares about the Constitution.

Mitt Romney, in my opinion, will talk the small-government talk that will be necessary to get elected, and then he will most likely prove to be yet another big-government Republican. This, I don't want. It will prove to be a disaster. Not as big a disaster as another four years of Obama, but I don't really want my choice to come down to the size of disaster I prefer.

Look, you can say what you like about conservatives, but at least with a real conservative running against Obama, the country would have a genuine choice. God knows I wish the Republican Party would quit trying to run away from conservatism and just run an unapologetic, genuinely small-government candidate.

How Seriously Would You Take It?

2011-01-22T08:05:00.000-08:00

I'd give you links, but as regular readers know, I rarely give them when critiquing someone else's blogging. I'm interested in the thinking, not in holding someone up to ridicule.

In the midst of the ongoing hue-and-cry over "civility" in public discourse, I read a post from someone in my Google Reader list the other day that really fascinated me. Whilst admitting that he sometimes ranted and that some people might be able to pick a bone with some of his posts, he clearly felt that in the main he'd been fairly reasonable and even humorous.

The problem lies with all those scurrilous folks on the right, don'tcha know.

Well, I've been reading his blog for some little time. On some subjects, I think the man does yeoman service to the blogosphere. I have often thought that even if I didn't agree with a word the man said on some subjects that we'd enjoy having a beer together. On other subjects--well, let's just say I think the man lacks objectivity.

Bear in mind that I have not quoted. In many, many cases, an actual quote would be far harsher than what I have listed here.

Just in this post, between the post itself and the comments:

Folks on the right fund vicious propaganda intended to get liberals killed.

It's the right wing, not the left, that puts their violent rhetoric into action.

There are lots more people on the right that use violent rhetoric.

Calling the right obscene names is no different from yelling "fire" when you see a theater on fire.

People on the right are too stupid to know when it's raining outside.

People on the right are in the business of picking your pocket.

People on the right duck responsibility.

People on the right are mindless drones.

People on the right live in a fantasy world.

From elsewhere on the same blog (It takes only a few seconds to find these things):

Dick Cheney is a ----head.

People on the right oppose Obama because they are racist knaves in the hustings, a neo-confederacy funded by corporations.

People on the right are stupid and don't have their ---- together.

White people want to ban minorities from their business places.

Opposition to Obama and the Democrats is flirting with fascism.

Sarah Palin--my word, just the stuff on Sarah Palin on this blog!--is empty-headed and stupid.

People on the right are low-information voters and outright racists.

People on the right are led by corporate overlords.

When people on the right say that Obama trends fascist, they are guilty of projection.

People on the right are too stupid to differentiate between communism and fascism.

The Tea Party has no sense of decency.

Republicans are "republif----" and "conservabots."

People on the right ought to fear Pacific Northwest Hippies.

There is an illustration (used more than once) of Sarah Palin as a giant, flying, makeup-smeared pig being ridden by John McCain and George Bush.

There is another illustration of Sarah Palin holding the Statue of Liberty, bloodied, as though it were a fresh kill.

Sarah Palin is the wicked witch of the North.

He wants to rip Chuck Norris a new rear orifice.

The Bush administration constituted eight long years of fascism.

Chuck Norris is a "Texas treasonist."

Rush Limbaugh is a serial propagandist.

Chuck Norris is a cow-pie.

There is a photoshopped illustration of John McCain with a milk mustache, together with Sarah Palin, charmingly captioned, "Got MILF? It Does a POW Good."

Evangelical Christians belong to the Evangelical Christian "Reich."

Believing in the Rapture is on a par with divining the future from disemboweled chickens.

American Evangelicals are the American version of the Taliban.

Tea Partiers are--of course!--"teabaggers." Not for the first time, I note that when people on the Left want to mock people, they don't hesitate to mock them by implying that they are closet homosexuals, despite the fact that they profess to be tolerant of homosexuality.

American Evangelicals want to turn America into a theocracy.

Now, I am not going to bother to comment in detail on any one of those, nor am I going to bother to argue any of the allegations, at least not at this time. It would take way too much time.

I am only going to ask a few simple questions:

Would you take a call for "civility" from this person seriously? Would you consider this sort of commentary fairly reasonable? Would you take the excuse that it was "humor" seriously? Or would you conclude that he has less room to talk than he thinks?

To close: I don't have a problem with this man and his commenters articulating their positions or saying these things. Needless to say, there are places where I disagree and places where I think his investigations are, so to speak, incomplete.

In the end, I think you just have to accept the fact that political rhetoric in a free society gets heated.

Disturbingly Appropriate

2011-01-22T02:00:00.001-08:00

I'm gonna hafta print me out one o' these for work.
Found this courtesy of a Facebook friend.

A Letter to Alan Simpson

2011-01-22T02:00:00.000-08:00

This was forwarded to me by a relative, and despite a couple of very small issues--such as that I don't know that Social Security funds were secure "for decades"--it struck me as richly appropriate, and fairly reflective of how an awful lot of people I know are coming to feel. I have made a few small edits for language.

Senator Alan Simpson Calls Seniors 'Greediest Generation'...and gets this response from a man in Montana....who - like the rest of us - has just about had enough.
Hey Alan,

Let’s get a few things straight….

1. As a career politician, you have been on the public dole for FIFTY YEARS…
2. I have been paying Social Security taxes for 48 YEARS (since I was 15 years old).
3. My Social Security payments, and those of millions of other Americans, were safely tucked away in an interest bearing account for decades until you political pukes decided to raid the account and give OUR money to a bunch of zero-ambition losers in return for votes, thus bankrupting the system and turning Social Security into a Ponzi scheme that would have made Bernie Madoff proud…
4. Recently, just like Lucy & Charlie Brown, you and your ilk pulled the proverbial football away from millions of American seniors nearing retirement and moved the goal posts for full retirement from age 65 to age 67. NOW, you and your shill commission is proposing to move the goal posts YET AGAIN…
5. I, and millions of other Americans, have been paying into Medicare from Day One, and now you morons propose to change the rules of the game. Why? Because you idiots mismanaged other parts of the economy to such an extent that you need to steal money from Medicare to pay the bills…
6. I, and millions of other Americans, have been paying income taxes our entire lives, and now you propose to increase our taxes yet again. Why? Because you incompetent b------- spent our money so profligately that you just kept on spending even after you ran out of money. Now, you come to the American taxpayers and say you need more to pay off YOUR debt… To add insult to injury, you label us “greedy” for calling “bull----” on your incompetence.

Well, Captain Bull----, I have a few questions for YOU…

1. How much money have you earned from the American taxpayers during your pathetic 50-year political career?
2. At what age did you retire from your pathetic political career, and how much are you receiving in annual retirement benefits from the American taxpayers?
3. How much do you pay for YOUR government provided health insurance?
4. What cuts in YOUR retirement and healthcare benefits are you proposing in your disgusting deficit reduction proposal, or, as usual, have you exempted yourself and your political cronies?

It is you, Captain Bull----, and your political co-conspirators who are “greedy”. It is you and they who have bankrupted America and stolen the American dream from millions of loyal, patriotic taxpayers. And for what? Votes. That’s right, sir. You and yours have bankrupted America for the sole purpose of advancing your pathetic political careers. You know it, we know it, and you know that we know it. And you can take that to the bank, you miserable son of a -----.

This is the reality that rather a lot of people are finally starting to wake up to, and amazingly, some of you on the Left think that Obama's managed to rescue it all by calling for "civility" after the Arizona murders.

I think not. Whether we are successful in extricating ourselves from this fiscal nightmare or not--and yes, I agree that Republicans deserve their share of the blame--you're never going to see real unity in American politics again. Too many people have awakened to the fact that they have been seen as nothing but a means to political power, cloaked in a mask of sympathy for "the poor," and I don't think they are going to forget it.

The Story of My Knives

2011-01-21T20:12:00.000-08:00

My kitchen knives, silly. I know all the martial artists out there were practically salivating at the prospect of yet another post on fighting knives. Sorry to disappoint 'em, but hey, them's the breaks.

For many years I made do with only the crappiest of paring knives and what--in retrospect--was some hideous old carbon steel utility knife of distinctly useless proportions. A couple of years ago, I added a really cheap chef's knife. I put up with these knives on the grounds that I didn't have a lot of money to spare and that, after all, I did know how to put a pretty good edge on a knife fairly quickly and could resharpen my pieces of junk whenever necessary.

"Necessary" actually meant "quite often," but what did I care?

Then, about a year or so ago, my grandmother moved into quite a nice little nursing home (she was ninety-one at the time and extremely frail) and when me Sainted Irish Mother cleared out Grandma's kitchen, she asked Mrs. MOTW to look over her things and ~~pirate~~ accept such things as she thought we might be able to use. Ordinarily, as chief cook and bottle washer, this would have been my task, but I was just too busy and was also convinced that I didn't need much of anything I didn't already have.

Amongst the things Mrs. MOTW brought home was this paring knife and a matching boning knife. At first, I didn't bother to look at them closely. I just thought, "Oh, knives. Already got some," and tossed them into my junk drawer. Then, when my other knives were dirty, I started picking them up and using them.

Oh my. It didn't take long for me to realize that these knives were, shall we say, a cut above anything else I had ever used, even in the restaurant business, and I rapidly became convinced that I simply had to have a chef's knife from the same manufacturer (Henckels, if you want to know). So, when me Sainted Irish Mother asked for suggestions as to what to get me for my birthday, I asked for this one. It's not from the same series as the other two knives, but the reviews on Amazon--a number of which were from restaurant line cooks who presumably have figured out what does and does not work over the long haul--were, overall, very positive, and the price seemed reasonable, so why not?

It was pretty sharp right out of the box, and I think I took my Arkansas stone to it once within about a week of getting it, but about that time I happened to see this li'l video from Gordon Ramsay on how to use a honing steel (I'd have embedded it, but embedding was disabled). Now, I'd never used a steel in the kitchen before, but after seeing that video, I picked up a couple of steels at the thrift store. The one I use now cost me a big 66 cents, and I use Chef Ramsay's method for a few strokes before using my knives. Every time.

I will say this: it's not really sharpening a knife. That really requires a stone. What Chef Ramsay is showing you how to do is maintain an edge, in much the same way a person who shaves with a straight razor will maintain the edge of his razor with a strop. And boy, howdy, does it work. I've had that chef's knife since--what? the tail end of October?--and other than that one sharpening I gave it early on, it hasn't needed a thing but a few daily strokes on the steel. And all three of those Henckels knives will very easily shave hairs off my arm, which I figure is sharp enough for just about any normal cook.

My knives--especially the chef's knife, which I have come to refer to (not out loud, of course) as "the vorpal sword"--are such pleasures to use that I almost pray to have an excuse to fetch them out of the knife block.

A knife block, by the way, is more important than I thought before starting to look into this subject. Turns out the purpose of a knife block is not to attractively display your knives, which is what I thought for many years, but to keep your knives from being knocked around in your utility drawer and getting their edges all dinged up. I got mine at the thrift store for about two bucks.

You can spend more money on knives. I've seen an ad for a chef's knife that cost about two hundred simoleons, and it was gorgeous, and I have no doubt that it was a superlative knife. I'm not about to knock it. A good quality knife, reasonably cared for, can last a lifetime, so what's 200 bucks over the course of decades? If the knife does its job well and gives you a great deal of pleasure in the process? No, I'm not about to knock it. But truthfully, I have a hard time believing that a knife could, in practice, be much more satisfactory than the ones I've got on hand.

What prompted me to write about so dull a subject as my kitchen knives? I dunno. Pleasurably hacking my way through a stack of potatoes for tonight's dinner, I guess. But there it is. Just my two cents.

Andrew Klavan on Incendiary Political Rhetoric

2011-01-21T02:00:00.000-08:00

Not bad. Not bad at all.

...the Left’s sudden talk about incendiary political rhetoric in the wake of the Arizona shooting isn’t really about political rhetoric at all. It’s about the real-world failure of leftist policies everywhere—the bankrupting of nations and states by greedy unions and unfundable social programs, the destruction of inner cities by identity politics, and the appeasement of Muslim extremists in the face of worldwide jihad, not to mention the frequently fatal effects of delirious environmentalism. Europe is in debt and on fire. American citizens are in political revolt. Even the most left-wing president ever is making desperate overtures to his right.

But all that might be tolerable to leftists if they weren’t starting to lose control of the one weapon in which they have the most faith: the narrative. The narrative is what leftists believe in instead of the truth. If they can blame George W. Bush for the economic crisis, if they can make Sarah Palin out to be an idiot, if they can call the Tea Party racist until you think it must be true, they might yet retain power in spite of the international disgrace of their ideas. And though they still mostly dominate the narrative on the three broadcast networks, most cable stations, most newspapers, and much of Hollywood, nonetheless Fox News, talk radio, the Internet, and the Wall Street Journal have begun to respond in ways they can’t ignore.

That’s the hateful rhetoric they’re talking about: conservatives interrupting the stream of leftist invective in order to dismantle their arguments with the facts.

At this point, I'm not sure I could count the number of relatively conservative writers who have documented, with link after link after link, example after example of the very sort of rhetoric on the left that the left is currently decrying, saying that it may have pushed the Arizona shooter over the edge.

I don't believe that, not for an instant, never have. Leftists engage in the worst sort of verbal warfare on a regular basis. Then they are just speaking truth to power. When someone on the right uses phrases connected with our gun-loving culture (that is not a criticism; I like guns, too), such as "lock and load," or "don't retreat, reload," to encourage, not armed rebellion, but regrouping for another electoral cycle--well, leftists pretend that we have gone completely over the edge. Then they try to stretch the concept by implying, or by saying outright, that saying such things as that Barack Obama is a communist in all but name is tantamount to encouraging lunatics to shoot congresswomen.

My pasty white butt. All they are trying to do is marginalize their critics, to get them either to mute the criticism or to get the public not to listen.

Dennis Prager on Leftism and "Sacred Texts"

2011-01-20T02:00:00.000-08:00

Just as an aside, Prager is no fundamentalist Christian. Unless he's converted since last I heard, he's a Jew.

...for leftism -- though not necessarily for every individual who considers himself a leftist -- there are no sacred texts. The two major examples are the Constitution and the Bible.

One cannot understand the left without understanding this. The demotion of the sacred in general and of sacred texts specifically is at the center of leftist thinking.

The reason is that elevating any standard, any religion, any text to the level of the sacred means that that it is above any individual. Therefore, what any one individual or even society believes is of secondary importance to that which is deemed sacred. If, to cite the most obvious example, the Bible is sacred, then I have to revere it more than I revere my own feelings in assessing what is right and wrong.

But for the left, what is right and wrong is determined by every individual's feelings, not by anything above the individual.

[snip]

...Western civilization was built on the idea that the individual and society are morally accountable to God and to the moral demands of that book. That was the view, incidentally, of every one of the Founders including deists such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.

This is entirely unacceptable to the left.

[snip]

This explains the belief that is universally held on the left that the Constitution is an "evolving text," meaning that it says what anyone (on the left) wants it to say.

[snip]

There are humble individuals and arrogant individuals on the right and on the left. But there is no arrogance like leftist arrogance. If you hold a Leftist position, you know that you are smarter, wiser and more moral not only than conservatives, but more so than the Bible, more so than the Constitution, indeed often more so than everyone who lived before you.

Same-sex marriage is a perfect example. The fact that neither Moses nor the Hebrew prophets, nor Jesus nor the Buddha nor any great secular humanist thinker ever advocated defining marriage as between members of the same sex does not cause the left to rethink its advocacy of same-sex marriage; it only proves to them how morally superior they are to Moses, Jesus, the prophets and everyone else who lived before them.

[snip]

For the left, there are no sacred texts. There are only sacred (liberal) feelings.

The Eastern Mind

2011-01-19T02:00:00.000-08:00

I picked up one of Dr. Zacharias' old books the other day, used, and found this passage, which I had read elsewhere once, and thought it worth sharing. Do bear in mind that Dr. Zacharias was born and raised in India:

At the end of the lecture, he stormed to the front with his note-takers and exploded, "You have done the greatest damage to Eastern philosophy I have ever seen anyone do, and the reason is that you don't understand the Eastern mind." Even his own students could not help but see the irony of a Westerner telling an Easterner that he did not understand the Eastern mind. This was indeed comical.

I decided the time had come to rescue this discussion from ridicule, so I asked him to meet me for lunch the next day where we could try and work through our disagreement. He accepted, and when we met, he wasted no time. He began with, "Your biggest problem is that you do not understand Eastern logic." I concluded it would be best to let him explain Eastern logic to me. His argument expounded on two kinds of logic, one the either/or logic and the other, the both/and logic. "The either/or logic," he said, "is built on the law of noncontradiction, meaning that if a statement is true, its opposite has to be false." So far I agreed with him.

As the professor waxed eloquent and expounded on the law of non-contradiction, he eventually drew his conclusion: "This is a Western way of looking at reality." I disagreed with that conclusion and asked him to cross it off his placemat where he had delineated his syllogisms. He refused, and I allowed him to proceed, knowing that sooner or later he would have to reject his conclusion.

His next major explanation was on the dialectical method. This is not either/or; this is both/and. G.W.F. Hegel used this in his dialectic between an idea (a thesis) and its opposite (an antithesis) to form the synthesis (finding a middle ground). Karl Marx used it to demonstrate history's inexorable move from the employer on one side and the employee on the other to a merger into a classless society. (Strangely, no one ever shows you a classless society.) My philosopher friend went to great lengths to establish the both/and logic as a superior way by which to establish truth.

"So, Dr. Zacharias," he said, "when you see one Hindu affirming that God is personal and another insisting that God is not personal, just because it is contradictory you should not see it as a problem. The real problem is that you are seeing that contradiction as a Westerner when you should be approaching it as an Easterner. The both/and is the Eastern way of viewing reality." Again I asked him to strike out the last line of his conclusion on the both/and system, but of course he did not.

After he had belabored these two ideas of either/or and both/and for some time and carried on his tirade that we ought not to study truth from a Western point of view but rather from an Eastern viewpoint, I finally asked if I could interrupt his unpunctuated train of thought and raise one question. He agreed and put down his pencil.

I said, "Sir, are you telling me that when I am studying Hinduism I either use the both/and system of logic or nothing else?"

There was pin-drop silence for what seemed an eternity. I repeated my question: "Are you telling me that when I am studying Hinduism I either use the both/and logic or nothing else? Have I got that right?"

He threw his head back and said, "The either/or does seem to emerge, doesn't it?"

"Indeed, it does emerge, " I said. "And as a matter of fact, even in India we look we look both ways before we cross the street--it is either the bus or me, not both of us."

Do you see the mistake he was making? He was using the either/or logic in order to prove the both/and. The more you try to hammer the law of noncontradiction, the more it hammers you. (Another way to consider this discussion is to say that if the both/and logic is all you make it to be, why can't I use both the both/and and the either/or? Why just one of them?)

Now let me make two vitally, vitally important points here. This philosopher was partly right. In the East there is a popular tendency to appear accepting of all religions as just different facets of the same truth.

Dr. Radhakrishnan (the noted Indian philosopher who taught at Oxford succeeding the renowned Dr. Zaehner and then went on to become India's president) made a staggering comment in his book The Hindu View of Life. He said that one can be a Muslim, a Christian, a Buddhist, and even an atheist--and still be a Hindu. Radhakrishnan was clearly equivocating. He himself confessed elsewhere that Hinduism had opened its arms so wide to include so much that when the arms finally closed, Hinduism would be strangled by the embrace.

However, popular Hinduism is not classical Hinduism, and the whole method of teaching of the greatest Hindu philosopher Shankara was quite Socratic as he debated ideas not in a dialectical mode (both/and) but in a noncontradictory mode (either/or). He would challenge his antagonists to prove him wrong, and if not, to surrender to his view. The point, then, is not whether we used an Eastern logic or a Western logic. We use the logic that best reflects reality, and the law of noncontradiction is implicitly or explicitly implied by both the East and the West.

I can't tell you the number of times I've had conversations along these lines.

I have had Emergents, in particular, tell me the wildest things. One told me that the law of noncontradiction wasn't such a big deal, that philosophers had developed non-contradictory logics--which necessarily meant, I tried to get him to understand, that those logics both did and did not apply to our discussion.

He didn't get it.

One guy, a fairly well-known Emergent mover and shaker, actually dropped by a blog I used to write, and told me that I was "wrong." Then in a subsequent comment that I was "flat wrong."

He was fairly well-known for saying that truth was defined in community, and clearly, he had no idea how my community defined truth. "Truth" be told, I don't think it ever occurred to him that in trying to tell me that I was "wrong," he was necessarily embracing the concept of an objective truth, that is, a truth that was true regardless of what one's community said about it.

In the end, you can't have it all ways. Not everything is true. Religions don't all lead to the same place. Cultures aren't all equal. Some bottles are better than others--for a given task, at least.

Code and Liberals

2011-01-18T17:56:00.000-08:00

Code: that element of modern communication by which liberals understand conservatives to mean things they have never actually said.

In other words, if liberals can't actually find you saying the evil things they fondly imagine you saying--and lately, what they want you to have said are things more vile than they have said, lest all the air get sucked out of their hateful-conservative-rhetoric-drove-Loughner-over-the-edge balloon--they feel perfectly free to make things up. The instant liberals start talking about "code," it's a tacit admission that you, you evil conservative, you, haven't actually said anything that they can successfully demonize. Not to any normal person, anyway. For example, "Rush Limbaugh's racist code" means that Rush hasn't actually said anything racist, at least not anything that any normal person would recognize as racist.

Oh, let 'em have fun. They haven't yet realized that fewer and fewer people believe their crap with each passing day.

Those liberals who don't actually pull this sort of crap, and of course I know some: don't take it personally. I didn't mean you.

Sadly, I Suspect This is True

2011-01-18T02:00:00.000-08:00

Mark Hyman says:

We complain of not having enough time to cook, but Americans spend more time watching cooking on the Food Network, than actually preparing their own meals. In his series Food Revolution, Jamie Oliver showed us how we have raised a generation of Americans who can’t recognize a single vegetable or fruit, and don’t know how to cook

I hate to say it, but that really is how it's beginning to look to me.

Hat tip: Carla.

Public Indoctrination

2011-01-17T02:00:00.000-08:00

Alert readers may have noticed that I often tag posts dealing with government education--you may call it "public education"--with "public indoctrination."

Well, it is. That's its historical genesis. Granted, it's more effective in some cases than others, but that's what government education has been all about. That's what it's for: Indoctrination.

If you got out of it with a reasonable grasp of critical thinking, count yourself blessed.

Photo courtesy of a Facebook friend.

Aw, Go Ahead: Just Say "No!"

2011-01-16T05:34:00.000-08:00

I had to chuckle. The-blog-that-shall-not-be-named just published a li'l something to the effect that the president has come out of the Arizona shooting with a renewed luster.

That doesn't interest me. Yes, the man makes a good speech. We've all conceded that from the get-go. It is the only reason he is in office. He hasn't got any economic ideas he didn't swipe from Karl Marx, any political tactics he didn't swipe from Saul Alinsky, and his depth of experience in anything but thuggery is tissue-paper thin. But he's a heckuva an orator. Sounds good, even when he's saying nothing of substance.

He throws people under the bus when it suits him (a common political trait; I'm not actually faulting him for this any more than I would any other politician), and his Arizona speech is just one more example, so much so that Patrick Buchanan, in one of those moments wherein I actually disagree with the man, wrote a whole column about how the political "survivor," Barack Obama, has abandoned the left in order to have a decent chance at re-election.

I don't think the president has abandoned the Left, not really. He may have temporarily thrown them under the bus rhetorically, but I detect not a whiff of anything resembling a substantial change in policy.

But like I say, that's not really what interests me. What interests me is that the aforementioned bloggers have resurrected the canard that now the Republicans will actually have to do something besides "just say 'no,'" and this will be a problem. This made me chuckle, on two counts:

1) This sounds like a petulant attempt to blame Republicans because the Left didn't get everything it wanted over the last couple of years. Petulant because they did get an awful darn lot of what they wanted, and it's had a very negative effect on the economy, which still bites, tremendously deepened our debt, and would have already, in my opinion, given us very substantial inflation were it not for what I think is a sharp decline in velocity (Yes, I know; almost no one knows what "velocity" is, in economic terms. I am not going to explain it here. You will have to google it.). Petulant because, 'til Scott Brown was elected, there was not a darn thing Republicans could do to deprive the Left of anything it wanted. The Democrats had all the votes they needed, but not all the Democrats were completely on board with Obama's insane agenda.

Friends, if you've got substantial majorities in both houses, plus the presidency, blaming the opposition party for your failure to enact everything on your wish list is the very definition of "lame."

2) When you're being driven over the cliff, just saying--no, screaming, at the top of your lungs--"NO! NO! STOP!" actually is a policy.

Just sayin'.

From Da Beckmeister

2011-01-16T02:00:00.000-08:00

Now, the truth is that I hardly ever listen to Glenn Beck. He's on opposite the Talkmaster, whom I generally prefer. But Mrs. MOTW brought home Beck's latest book from da liberry and I decided to give it at least a quick glancing over. In so doing, I found this:

The Constitution does not encourage us to save all of mankind or reorganize the world. The Founding Fathers recognized that the world is a dangerous place and that, from time to time, America would need to be prepared to fight to maintain its freedom. But they were also quite clear that they did not regard America as an empire. Nor were they interested in a crusade. On July 4, 1821, John Quincy Adams set out to simply explain America's role in the world:
[America] goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own...She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assumes the colors and usurp the standard of
freedom.
The Constitution simply says we are to "provide for the common defense." Obviously, that doesn't mean we can or should simply pull our troops from everywhere we have them stationed. That would not only put allies in harm's way; it would also be a slap in the face to all the troops who've given up so much to serve and protect.

So, before I pull out my scalpel or my chainsaw, here are my basic principles for national defense:
We mind our own business. We are not on the hunt for new enemies in the world. America will be your best friend and will treat you fairly if you do the same to us.

The enemy of my enemy is not my friend. We are not going to prop up corrupt or dangerous governments simply because they happen to hate countries that hate us.

We sacrifice our values at our own peril. We are going to conduct ourselves consistently with our values. That means not befriending countries that we don't agree with simply because they have something of
value. Yes, Saudi Arabia, I'm talking to you.

If you mess with us, we will fight to win. America's military arsenal is unparalleled in human history, but the last time the full might and muscle of our armed forces was released was World War II. Since then
wars have been fought "humanely" with an eye toward minimizing damage. The results have not been pretty.

That ends now. If America is provoked into a war, then we fight with everything we have. War is hell and should never be taken lightly. But when it's declared (and it must be declared), America must crush its
enemy.

We will not rebuild the rubble we reduce you to. If you provoke America and we unleash our full arsenal, you will be reduced to rubble. We will not waste our time or resources rebuilding your country
afterward.

I don't have a whole lot of problem with this. I have said more than a few times that we made a fundamental mistake in not insisting that Congress either declare war or refuse to do so vis-a-vis Iraq and Afghanistan. I don't like entangling alliances, as Washington called them, and we have far too many. Germany and the rest of Europe, and Japan and South Korea should be able to defend themselves by now.

The job of America's armed forces should be to defend the United States, period, end of story. We should not be trying to remake other countries into our image. We cannot democratize the world and should not waste time, blood, and money trying. Any wars we do declare should be fought to win, and I agree that it's not our responsibility to rebuild our enemies' territory and economies. I also think we ought, in this age of terrorism, to revisit the subject of letters of marque and reprisal.

Just my two cents.

Jihad Watch on Neocons

2011-01-15T02:00:00.000-08:00

It amuses me when I hear some people talk about Neocons, either as though they don't actually exist, or as though neoconservatism is the only sort of conservatism there is. I enjoyed this l'il comment:

...neoconservatism, for all its pretense of being tough-minded and militaristic, is at heart an ideology based on the following premises:
a) People tend to act in their own rational self-interest.
b) Not everyone is smart enough to understand where his self-interest lies.
c) We are. (Just look at our SAT scores!) In fact, we're so clever, we even know our enemies' self-interest better than they do.
d) So we can explain it to them, and eventually they'll come around to agree with us.
e) Then everyone will be Americans.
This was the logic underlying our disastrous invasion of Iraq.

[snip]

...we were regaled with plans to "put an end to evil" and "transform the Middle East" (presumably into the shape of Jerry Seinfeld's Upper West Side). That demanded a lengthy occupation; democratic elections; the empowerment of the Shi'ites; and the search for "moderate Muslims" who would serve as our regional allies. Likewise, our quagmire occupation of Afghanistan forced us to make allies of the "best" people we could find in Pakistan--whom we'd have to support, even as they enforced barbaric blasphemy laws, and covertly protected terrorists on their soil. All these consequences followed from neoconservative premises, which are held with all the fervor of a secular religion. Indeed, when I've tried to confront a neocon with the bad news about Islam, the reaction I encounter is invariably fierce and fearful denial. They shake their heads and wave their fingers in my face:
Things cannot be so bad. You're being too pessimistic. You are a defeatist. Yours is a counsel of despair. There are a billion Muslims in the world: There has to be something we can do to fix all those people.
We have spent almost eight years trying to "fix" Iraq and Afghanistan, to prevail upon Pakistan, to hunt down "moderate Muslims" who will help us impose modern, secular, liberal democracy in the Middle East, and damp down the fires of radicalism among the Muslims who live in the West. We have accepted the claims of imposters like Imam Rauf and Reza Aslan, flooded Egypt and the Palestinian Authority with no-strings foreign aid, broken America's budget imposing a fragile order in Iraq--and what have we gotten for it?

[snip]

Neocons cannot face the truth about Islam--and indeed are as likely as liberals to demonize us when we try to tell it. Why? Because we are attacking all their most cherished illusions. We're insisting that human affairs are not a chess problem, or a really thorny edition of the Sunday Times crossword puzzle. We're presenting them with the reality that our enemies cannot be persuaded, will not be bribed, and are no longer intimidated. At best they be contained--and to do that the price will be high, the struggle longer and slower than the Cold War, with no guarantee of success.

Now--again--for the inevitable person who will think that ol' Man of the West is getting soft on the "war on terror," let me reiterate that I have no problem with it, per se, in fact, I think it is vitally necessary to resist militant Islam--and Islam, by the way, is by nature a militant religion. But I do think it has been a colossal mistake to try fighting the war on terror by trying to make societies that have no interest whatever in God-given natural rights and representative government into Western-style representative governments.

Listen, war is expensive. Even terrorist warfare is expensive. In a nutshell, this is my position: deprive the little boogers of money, to the fullest extent possible. Obviously, this involves drying up our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, which can be done, as we have plenty of resources in the United States, but will take time. In the meantime, we have to keep terrorists off-balance, leaderless, and on the run. I'm far more interested in doing that than I am in trying to get adherents of a massive death-cult to embrace democratic institutions.

Not a Whole Lot of Room for Mr. Sullivan to Talk?

2011-01-14T05:30:00.000-08:00

Reading Michelle Malkin's column today reminded me of something I had read the other day, some flap from Andrew Sullivan talking about how the Right needs to get its verbal act together. At the time, I mentioned that, to the best of my recollection, Andrew Sullivan was the guy who saw a dark conspiracy to convince the world that Sarah Palin is Trig Palin's mother, which, in my opinion, cast serious doubt on Mr. Sullivan's ability to recognize civility, should he chance to encounter it.

Mrs. Malkin's column reminded me of a couple more little incidents:

In April 2009, a disgruntled, unemployed loser shot and killed three Pittsburgh police officers in a horrifying bloodbath. The gunman, Richard Poplawski, was a dropout from the Marines who threw a food tray at a drill sergeant and had beaten his girlfriend. Was this deranged shooter who pulled the trigger to blame? Nope. Despite evidence that Poplawski's homicidal, racist tendencies manifested themselves years before Obama took office, lefty publications asserted that the real culprit of the spree was the "heated, apocalyptic rhetoric of the anti-Obama forces" (according to mainstream liberal Atlantic Monthly pundit Andrew Sullivan)...

[snip]

In September 2009, Bill Sparkman, a federal U.S. Census worker, was found dead in a secluded rural Kentucky cemetery with the word "Fed" scrawled on his chest with a rope around his neck. The Atlantic Monthly's Andrew Sullivan rushed to indict "Southern populist terrorism, whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts" in an online magazine post titled "No Suicide," which decried the "Kentucky lynching."

...

So, who killed Bill Sparkman? Bill Sparkman. He killed himself and deliberately manufactured a hate crime hoax as part of an insurance scam to benefit his surviving son.

God knows nobody's perfect, but one could be forgiven for suspecting that Mr. Sullivan speaks less from a genuine concern for civility than from--well, other motives. I'll leave it at that, and suggest, also, that he may suffer from the all-too-common tendency to open his mouth before he actually knows what's going on.

Yes, I saw the picture in a completely different context the other day. I just hope that someday Mr. Sullivan gets a chance to see it.

April on the Reading of the Constitution

2011-01-14T02:00:00.000-08:00

She writeth:

...we do have a political liturgy. Our peaceful succession of government is drenched in ritual, not the least of which is the taking of the oath to uphold the Constitution. The inauguration of a new Executive Administration every 4 years is so full of ritual that books are written about it. The ritual reaffirms the fact that the peaceful transfer of government is an amazing and impressive thing. It deserves to be taken seriously, with pomp and circumstance. And Aretha Franklin singing in an awesome hat.

Even if ever silly accusation about the Republicans reading the Constitution was true, so what? Why not include it at the opening of every session of Congress, in both houses jointly or separately? Like the man in his hour of need who recalls the Lord's Prayer learned as a child, it may return to lawmakers as they write laws demanding more and taking more from the citizenry.

An' all the people said, "Amen!"

Snort!

2011-01-13T04:51:00.000-08:00

Made my mornin', it did...

The winner of the most cretinous statement of 2011 -- and the list is now closed, so please hold your submissions -- is MSNBC's Chris Matthews, who on Monday night recalled Palin's statement, "We're not retreating, we're reloading," and said, I quote, "THAT'S not a metaphor."

Really, Chris? If that's not a metaphor, who did she shoot?

Ann Coulter, of course.

Openhand on Tuite

2011-01-13T02:00:00.000-08:00

More than a few times lately--well, shoot, over the years--I've read comments and blogposts about tuite and kyusho from people that are--well, they're just interesting, I'll put it that way. People will tell you to rap someone in the temple with a backfist--a technique involving a striking surface about the size of a fifty-cent piece impacting a target about the size of a fifty-cent piece--whilst simultaneously deriding nerve strikes (I am not making this up. I read a piece by one of the highest-ranking Isshin Ryu masters in North America doing this very thing.) They'll tell you that tuite is too complex, too much of a "fancy technique," to work in combat, under stressful conditions.

God knows I don't claim to be an expert on either kyusho or tuite, but I am pretty sure that anyone telling you such things isn't all that good at either one. Tuite is not very complex, not really, at least what I have been shown. It is simply the practical application of anatomy and body mechanics in a defensive situation. You are drilling the motions, over and over and over, in kata. You do not, under stress, have to rummage through your memory to find appropriate techniques any more than you have to rummage through your memory for appropriate driving maneuvers when you are trying to avoid an accident. Just like striking techniques, tuite kind of "pops out" of you when appropriate, if you are doing the practice. And if you are seeking techniques that do not require that you practice them in order for them to be readily effective for you, I would suggest that you are kind of wasting your time practicing martial arts in the first place.

Tuite is darned effective, once it becomes natural to you. I keep going back to the example of my own instructor, but that's because he's the perfect illustration. Doggone it, the man's a fairly smallish, ill, weak, oxygen patient of sixty-two years age, and he can quickly and easily overpower either me or my son with tuite. It doesn't require muscle. It can slam you to the deck in a heartbeat.

All I'll say about nerve strikes here is that in my limited experience, as you become more familiar with them, the vulnerable areas become easier to find and hit. I have learned painfully from my son that eventually, it becomes darn hard to miss those nerves. Dadgummit, the booger hardly ever misses my nerves...

All of which is to suggest that if you are interested in the subject, you visit this post by Openhand. It's a short education in the subject.

Please, God, Not Romney...

2011-01-12T02:00:00.000-08:00

When I see headlines like this--Insiders: Romney Is Top GOP 2012 Contender...--I just cringe.

It would, in my opinion, be hard to pick a Republican candidate for whom I would have less enthusiasm.

I don't really care that he is a cultist, in a way--and yes, Mormonism is, by any reasonable historical standard, a cult. He may know little or nothing of the official doctrines of his religion. That kind of thing is common enough. Many times, I have asked people (Baptists in particular) to explain just what the difference between a Baptist and a Methodist or a Presbyterian or a Catholic is. Very few can do it. Most people just go to church and sing the songs and about the only doctrine they know is, "Jesus saves!" And, too, since I am quite sure that most of the people running for or holding the office of president are faking whatever religious beliefs they profess anyway--well, it makes precious little difference to me whether it's a phony cultist or a phony Christian, you know?

But dadgummit, Romney is one of the worst of the big-government conservatives. Blech. This is the man responsible for Romneycare, which, if I am not mistaken, introduced the
much-and-deservedly-hated "individual mandate."

No. Not Romney. Try again, "Insiders."

Okay, He Sold Me

2011-01-11T02:00:00.000-08:00

Wade Burleson, Peace Be Upon Him, recommended this book, and by golly, if things look decent next payday, I'll order m'se'f a used copy. Looks good.

UPDATE: Turns out da liberry has not one, but four copies, so I'll be able to see for myself if it's worth shelling out the simoleons for my own copy before I do it.

MacMan of the West? Or Laird West?

2011-01-10T15:23:00.001-08:00

Via my sister-in-law, on Facebook:

I just traced some of -----'- roots to Scottish royalty in the year 1020.

I hear that when she finishes her genealogical researches, she'll let us see all the results.

I already knew that I had some Irish ancestry (my own surname is supposed to be some diminutive form of "Patrick"), and I've been told since I was a child that we had a Choctaw ancestor. I suspected that I might have some Scots blood. And, of course, you have to take into account that the Irish and Scots had a great deal of back-and-forth over the centuries and that in some cases, saying whether a person is Irish or Scots may be kind of open to interpretation.

Still, royalty. Kinda makes you want to treat me with more respect, doesn't it?

The Irish Independent on Islam and Islamic Immigration

2011-01-10T02:00:00.000-08:00

Link courtesy of Jihad Watch:

...how many Muslim immigrants can any society take, and yet retain the qualities that made it attractive to Muslims in the first place?...

And of course, if the immigrants then conform with local norms -- as British Hindus and Sikhs have usually done -- then there is usually no long-term problem. The result is a cultural enrichment and fusion in which everyone gains.

This is simply not true of Muslim immigration. Not merely is there not a single stable, prosperous Muslim democracy in the world, free of terrorism and fundamentalism, there is no society that has received large numbers of Muslims that has not soon been confronted by an Islamic defiance of existing societal norms. This defiance can be cultural, in which dissident dress code is sought as a religious right; or educational, in which Muslims are raised within their own autonomous school system; or legal, with a demand for Sharia law; or insurrectionary, in which local Muslims opt for terrorist jihad against the state which admitted them.

No European country -- not one -- that has admitted large numbers of Muslims has been spared any of these outcomes.

No European country -- not one -- that has admitted Hindus has had to face any comparable problem.

THE EU's response has been to ignore what it finds uncongenial to talk about, as meanwhile dogmatic "multiculturalists" silence sceptics with the perverse gagging laws that have arisen in every European country.

These make it almost impossible for Europeans to defend European values without being called "racist" or an "Islamophobe".

Country Folks and Poor Folks Don't Have to Worry About Stuff Like This

2011-01-09T02:00:00.000-08:00

This seems almost unbelievable to me. A homeowner's association is suing a resident because they say his flagpole doesn't meet their standards.

We don't have a homeowner's association in my neighborhood. The houses are all seventy or more years old, and as long as you keep the grass cut, pretty much nobody cares what else goes on in your yard, and that's the way I like it. I don't think I'd want to live in a place with a homeowner's association.

I've got co-workers that live in the country--and of course, I get to drive out in the country often enough, seen more small-town Oklahoma than you can shake a stick at--and the very idea of a homeowner's association out there would probably provoke howls of laughter.

Sheesh. Over a flagpole?

Gee, I Hate to Jump to Conclusions...

2011-01-08T17:02:00.000-08:00

...so I don't necessarily take this, from ABC News, as the final word:

In the YouTube profile, the account holder, identified as Loughner, lists "The Communist Manifesto" and "Mein Kampf" among his favorite books.

I know, I know--some of you out there are going to look at that and say, "What does that prove? Mein Kampf was by Hitler, and Hitler was a fascist, so that just means this guy was influenced by radicals from the far left and the far right!"

Well, you just go ahead and prove to anyone who's bothered to look into it how little you know about the subject, okay? Won't bother me a bit.

In the meantime, for those of you who are a little more open to reality, fascism is a variety of socialism--that is, both The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf are left-wing reading.

Anyway, I throw the quote up there mainly for the benefit of people who were all too ready to blame Sarah Palin for the shooting. I don't really blame left-wing rhetoric for this guy's lunacy. I don't even really blame The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf. Like as not, the guy claimed them as favorite reading material and probably never read them. I would agree that their simple presence on his lists doesn't prove much of anything. I just wish the lefties who jumped all over Sarah Palin were as open-minded about the situation.

And I wish it had never happened, obviously. This kind of thing is bad, bad medicine.

A Fine Kettle of Fish

2011-01-08T02:00:00.000-08:00

I perused the latest Urban Tulsa Weekly last night. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a left-wing rag, but they certainly have some left-wing columnists. There is one fellow whose answer to every question, in every column of his that I've read/scanned/perused that I can recall, has been to raise income taxes--on the rich, of course.

He calls it the "fairest tax." Strikes me as a bit weird, in that I always thought that "fair treatment" amounted to unbiased, equal treatment, and a progressive income tax is by definition unequal treatment. But that's just me, maybe. And also not really what's on my mind.

In this issue, he was charging that Republicans and conservatives talk about cutting spending, but when it comes to specifics, so far they haven't come up with anything very significant. What they are actually doing, he argues, is cutting taxes and engaging in corporate welfare at the federal and state levels and throwing the financial burden for "essential" (in quotes because what a leftist calls "essential" and what I call "essential" are likely to be more than a bit different) government services onto local governments, with the net effect that your property and sales taxes are about to go through the roof.

I'm not here to argue about that today. What got to me was that in a way, his criticism was cogent. Rather a lot of politicians--maybe most--really are reluctant to either cut those services or to raise taxes (I know, I know--the whole tax rates and revenue thing--later, OK?), with the net result that sooner or later, some kind of crisis has to erupt. It's hard to deal with some of these things, even--perhaps especially--on a principled basis.

Let's take Medicare and Social Security as examples. They are both obviously unconstitutional. Anyone who has read the document ought to be able to see that. Anyone with any doubts ought to read, first, the text of the Tenth Amendment (catty and ignorant comments about "tenthers" from people who clearly haven't read the material aside), then Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution, and then Federalist 41.

They are hideously expensive and rapidly growing unsustainable. It is not really going to be possible to tax the rich enough to pay for these programs very much longer--you did know that the top few percent of the income earners already pay about fifty percent of the income taxes, didn't you?.

And yet, I don't give a squat how conservative and constitutionally-minded you are, it is plain as day that just flat ending those unsustainable, unconstitutional programs immediately would cause incredible societal chaos.

So how do you deal with it? Let's just say it's magically within your power to just erase unconstitutional programs. Would you? Probably not. You'd probably want to find some way to phase them out, maybe over decades--but then, you'd inescapably be guilty of letting those unconstitutional programs linger on for decades.

Right now, our republic--what is left of it--is shot through with dilemmas of this sort. We have a whole series of questions for which there are no completely satisfactory answers and if we are able to extricate ourselves from the mess, it may be the work of decades.

Oh, sure, it all could have been avoided. It's not like we weren't warned.

ADDENDUM: As if on cue, when I opened up TownHall this morning, there was a column with this gem:

There are some great alternatives to raising the debt ceiling. Congress should hold votes to eliminate farm subsidies, abolish the Department of Education, close the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), shut down the Department of Energy, repeal Obamacare, and bring our troops home from places like Japan and Europe.

America will still have farming with no subsidies. Our communities will still have schools without the Department of Education, not one bureaucrat working there is in a classroom. HUD hasn't built as many homes as Habitat for Humanity. Power plants and oil companies produce energy and they don't depend on the Department of Energy. Obamacare hasn't started yet so we can avoid that new spending hole, and Japan and Germany aren't threatened by the Soviet Empire and the Red Chinese.

This is, of course, perfectly true. There is not really that much problem finding things that can be cut; the problem is more that the things that can be cut each come with now-huge constituencies, each of which will scream bloody blue murder to a public that has become so used to the existence of these governmental entities that it unthinkingly assumes that these are things that government is "supposed" to do. Neocons and others who think that the United States is somehow supposed to guarantee "democracy" around the world would likewise howl when we say that we need to examine the seven-hundred-odd military commitments we have around the world and refocus our military on its real mission: protecting the United States and the people therein.

Just Read It

2011-01-07T02:00:00.000-08:00

Quit wastin' time. You heard me. Click on the link and go.

The Resignation Letter I'd Like to Write

2011-01-05T19:22:00.000-08:00

There are some advantages to blogging anonymously. One is that you can get away with venting, as long as you are reasonably discreet. The following is the resignation letter that I would like to write when I eventually leave the company I am with--which will, hopefully, be sometime this Spring. I write, comfortable in the knowledge that only a very small handful of people know who I am, and fewer still know what I do for a living, and fewer even than that which company I work for. Of those--perhaps three or four people--none would "rat me out" to my current employers. Of my employers, I am quite confident that no one in my chain of command has any real clue what a blog is, let alone that I write one.

When I do leave, I will not give them this letter. Only a fool would do that. The resignation I actually turn in will be very brief and to-the-point, something like, "Thank you so much for the wonderful years you have permitted me to work here. However, other opportunities have arisen and beckon me to pursue them. Accordingly, I am resigning my position, effective ----- -, ----."

And that will be that. But for now, if you enjoy such things, enjoy the venting...

I have played a little loose with such dating as there is, so as to account for the way conditions will have changed between now and Spring.

As of this date, I have been working for ----- for somewhat over 7 years. Those years have not been without advantages and enjoyable moments. I have enjoyed the drives into our lovely state's beautiful countryside. I have enjoyed the diversity of my tasks. I have enjoyed being allowed to operate, in the main, almost entirely without supervision. I have enjoyed being granted a measure of forbearances, occasional forgiveness, and some personal favors. I have enjoyed the accolades and compliments that I have received from clients, caseworkers,
co-workers, and superiors. I have especially enjoyed the warm, personal relationships that I have developed with not a few of my clients. There are some, I know, who pray for me, and I for them.

All these things have been blessings; I don't deny it. They make it all the more painfully difficult to say what lies on the other hand, but say it I must.

To start with, I really do not think that anyone above my immediate supervisory level has any real idea as to what exactly it is that I do. I have not infrequently gotten the impression that most people in our organizational hierarchy think that I deliver diapers and otherwise exist to ferry computers and paperwork between various of our locations. This doesn't quite cover it. Let me, in a small space, attempt to explain more fully what I do.

I do, of course, deliver diapers and ferry computers. This is more involved than you may suppose. I am the person primarily and ultimately responsible for my routing. I must coordinate multiple stops over hundreds of miles with the schedules of people who, like as not, have dialysis, or doctor's appointments, special traveling arrangements, or even irregular sleeping habits. I have to be able to navigate, on the fly, around unexpected construction and people's schedule changes. I have to do this on my own, because, as an organization, you have repeatedly turned down requests for GPS units which cost less than 150 dollars and require no subscription fee.

When I have pointed out that the savings in gas and time owing to the elimination of occasional navigational errors would likely pay for such a unit in less than six months, I have been insultingly told that if only I were to pay attention, navigational errors would not be an issue! Saying that this borders on the delusional is understating the matter considerably. Increasingly, it is de rigeur for any sort of delivery operation to equip its vehicles with GPS. The savings benefits are indisputable. You, however, not only decline to make an obvious and small investment in saving time and money, you choose to insult your employees in the process!

Whilst still on the subject of "diaper delivery," let me point out that doing this simple task involves tactfully interacting with people from all walks of life, and occasionally from all points of the globe. I have to be on good terms with the rich and the poor, with the native and the foreigner, with the saints and with the wickedest of the reprobate. I have had to extract information from people who do not speak the language and from people whose illnesses render them no longer able to speak at all. I have had to communicate with people who cannot hear and with people who cannot see. I routinely have to communicate with and instruct people at every level of medical care: clients, family members, CNAs, nurses, doctors, records staff, case managers, and management. That I am exceptionally gifted at this is conceded, as far as I know, by every person who has worked with me.

I also deliver and install home medical equipment! I deliver home hospital beds, oxygen equipment, grab bars (!), nebulizers, walkers, wheelchairs, lift chairs, power wheelchairs, diabetic testing supplies,enteral feeding supplies and food, hand-held showers, and occasionally stuff that comes out of left field. On one level, I know that you know this. On the other, I am sure that you think that this is the simplest of tasks, and to be honest, there are days that it is. But it is also true that I have to know something about each of these items, enough to instruct nurses and family members and clients about the proper and intended use of each item.

Surprisingly often--at least I suspect that it might be surprising to you--I must single-handedly disassemble and/or rearrange a client's existing furniture before bringing in and installing or assembling their new equipment. With oxygen equipment, I must communicate basic safety, usage, and maintenance information. Grab bars must be installed--did you know, by the way, that most home medical equipment companies will not install grab bars? They will deliver them, along with a list of local handymen. I am quite unique in this respect--in the oddest of places, and solidly enough that clients who will inevitably ignore your warnings about the weight limitations of the installation will not be able to pull them loose. I might add that with grab bars, I am responsible for making the evaluations as to practicality, safety, and often, location. I must be able to cope with a wide range of surfaces, home construction, and installation conditions.

I will forgo the ins and outs of delivering other types of equipment, save to note that as far as equipment and installations are concerned, I am not infrequently tasked with evaluating both clients and residences for applicability, suitability, and ability. You might be surprised to find how my familiarity with how the body moves, gained from time spent in martial arts practice, has been relied on to make decisions.

I must also note that in the course of making deliveries and installations, I must not infrequently lift heavy and awkward weights, often effectively doing by myself things that sane people would send two people to do. I have routinely done things involving extremely high gross-out factors, things that would make a billy goat puke. I have given CPR to a corpse (not realizing that he was a corpse at the time, of course). I have tiptoed through collections of dog droppings that filled entire rooms. I have installed equipment in scorpion-infested homes. I have plunged my hands into pockets full of roaches. I have installed raised toilet seats on toilets that haven't been cleaned in years. I have delivered equipment to a house full of snakes. You honestly have no idea.

I must also mention that I have frequently been asked to repair equipment. More often than not, I have been successful. Since in 7 years the company has seen fit to send me to precisely one seminar, this is fairly impressive.

There are other things that I do. Warehouse and maintenance work. Occasional inventory. Once I actually assisted in the construction of a wall! Not a few pieces of our paperwork were drafted, in whole or in part, by me. I have, because of my command of the language and experience in human relations, been asked to review e-mails before they were sent. I have had to learn enough Spanish to say, "Sign here," "Who is your doctor?" "Is Mrs. So-and-so here?" and the like. I have had to win the trust of elderly women whose lives were spent partly under oppressive foreign regimes. I have driven through blizzards, on ice, through hail, through thunderstorms, down dirt "roads" that scarcely merited the name, into gang-infested areas of town. When a delivery is considered to be potentially unsafe in some way, it generally becomes my responsibility. There have been times I've been on the road as early as 5 a.m. and as late as 9 p.m. In order to accommodate clients' schedules or large numbers of stops or widely-separated stops, it is an unspoken given that I will frequently come in a couple of hours early or stay a couple of hours late.

One time, just before 5 p.m., someone sprang "one last stop" on me. I objected that it was not, strictly speaking, necessary and that I was committed to getting my daughter somewhere by 6. The response? The site supervisor suggested that I put my children in day-care! Now, lest you be tempted to point out, as my supervisor did, that "Sometimes we have to work late," I DO routinely work late! The problem here was not so much working late as it was that no one had bothered, given that we were at the end of the day, to ask the client if early the next morning would be just as good (it was, as it turns out--but, as another driver said when I told this story, "They never do that!"). It was just assumed that I would do it, with the practical result, to my mind, being that I was being asked to put my children in day-care so that the boss could commit me to working late without the bother of checking with me.

I must also mention the time that it was seriously suggested that I go home early on Fridays when possible, so as to avoid overtime. In other words, my boss wanted me to work 11-hour days on Tuesdays and Thursdays without actually reaping any financial rewards.

I could go on, and indeed, am tempted to, as I am still not sure that you fully appreciate just what it is that I do. I am sure that you do not understand how hard it is to find people who can do it well. It is true that you could find, for any one or two facets of the job, plenty of people. But the number of people who could do all of it? That is not a very big number. Let's move on, though, and consider what my reward has been for all of this. What have I gotten out of all of it? The job has not been without its pluses, as noted at the beginning of the letter. I might also say that the job has been reasonably stable.

But on the other hand...

Neither I nor anyone else outside management ranks--yes, we know about management's raises, you all seem to consider yourselves "indispensable personnel," don't you?--has had a raise in three years, save for the recent insultingly small one that was clearly untied to personal performance. We have been told that there was no money, which we all question, because, again, we know about your raises, your benefits, and so forth, that is, we know that the allegedly company-wide lack of funds has had no effect on you. We have been asked to accept bonuses (which were neither scheduled nor guaranteed) in place of raises. Now, none of this would have been so bad, but you compounded this maneuver by telling us, systemwide, that the bonuses were as good as the raises we had been led to believe we were going to get--three years ago. That this manifestly wasn't so for any full-time employee, even those who never got overtime, was obvious for anyone with a calculator to see. And for anyone who did get overtime--well, it definitely wasn't so.

I wonder if you have any idea how much credibility you, as management, lost over that episode. You don't get out much. Believe me, I know. I do get out, though, and please believe me, you had people system-wide saying, "They think we're stupid," and "They think we can't add." As I said, just saying you didn't have the money wouldn't have been so bad (even if it weren't true), but you had to insult the majority of your workforce, including me, by telling an obvious lie, apparently on the assumption that we would all be too stupid to know.

Have I gotten good benefits? No. I have not.

Have I gotten paid holidays? No. I have not. I have even been discouraged from working extra on days before a holiday so as to make up the lost income, with the net effect that my family takes it in the shorts every time a holiday rolls around.

Has my pay increased? No, it has not. It has declined from its peak by about 3, 000 dollars a year, because of the aggressive ways you have slashed overtime (which, incidentally, also slashed the number of visits I make to the countryside, which was one of the best things about the job). I don't begrudge you the cost-saving moves; that's just business. I am just saying that effectively cutting my pay doesn't really constitute an incentive for me to stay.

Have I gotten more vacation time? No, I have not. I have to be here for 10 years before I get another week of vacation time.

I recognize that I am not a perfect employee. I have my flaws and I don't deny it. The reality is, though, that of the criticisms that may be made of me--well, they are all of a piece, you might say. They are all the sort of thing that happens when you are overrun, when you are expected to do too much in too little time, when you have to let the little things go in pursuit of the big things. "They only take a few seconds," you say, apparently blitheringly unaware that I--and your other employees, too--have been eating lunch while we drive, or at our desks, for years. You don't appear to have noticed that there are no more "seconds" in a normal day to be had. I have made a special effort to remedy my little deficiencies over the last few months. Perhaps you noticed. It cost you about three more hours of overtime each week, but it was the only way I could do it.

To finish: yes, I know that I am not perfect. In the main, though, I have been exceptionally reliable, tactful, independent, inventive, creative, and productive. For three years now, I have been not only been given no incentive to improve, nothing to shoot for, no raise to strive for, I have actually seen my pay decline from its peak and no signs of improvement are on the horizon. I have found that I can do better elsewhere, and accordingly, I hereby tender my resignation, effective --- ---, ----.

Yours,

Man of the West

Mouse ----! You Understand Mouse ----? or Thoughts on Cussing

2011-01-03T02:00:00.000-08:00

Over the years, I have seen a few blogposts dealing with the subject of cussing, or foul language, mostly from Christian perspective. As a matter of fact, I can't recall any post on the subject that wasn't trying to approach it from a Christian perspective.

I have to tell you right up front that I was in the United States Marine Corps Reserve for five years, and at one time, I possessed the usual unmitigated fluency in cussing common to most U.S. Marines. It is, however, very rare that I cuss these days. Cussing events are mostly of the I-hit-my-thumb-with-the-hammer sort. That may color your opinion of what I have to say or it may not, but at least you know.

I have thought about writing this post a million times, I think. Just about every time, a memory has come to my mind, a conversation I once had with a sanitarian, or "health inspector," as you may call them. Y'see, I was in the fast-food business for about fourteen years, and was on friendly terms with several of the city's sanitarians. One time, one of them was explaining some of the difficulties that they occasionally had with ethnic residents. He gave me the example of a time that he found mouse droppings in one Asian-style restaurant, a place where the staff was all from overseas and had a very limited command of English.

"You have mice. You need to call the exterminator."

"What?"

"You have mice. Look, you see? Mouse droppings."

"What?"

"Mouse droppings. Mouse dung."

"What?"

"You know--feces."

"What?"

"Poop?"

"What?"

"MOUSE ----! You understand MOUSE ----?!"

The man did indeed understand, "mouse ----," as it turns out.

My question for you is: was the sanitarian cussing? Or communicating?

I don't think the difference is always quite so cut-and-dried as some people like to think.

Usually, when the question of cussing or foul language comes up in Christian circles, people opposed to cussing--that would be most Christians I've met--will cite Paul's admonitions to avoid "filthy talking" or "coarse jesting."

And let me make something clear before I go on: I regard the Bible, including Paul's letters, as the word of Almighty God. I absolutely will tell you that Paul said exactly what God intended him to say, and that it means what it says.

On the other hand, I've read multiple translations of the Bible, and I have yet to find any one of them that gives me a crystal-clear definition of what "filthy talking" and "coarse jesting" are. We have Ephesians 4: 29, which says, in the NKJV, "Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers." The NET Bible renders it, "Let no unwholesome word..." The ESV, my favorite translation, has, "...corrupting talk..." Then there is Colossians 3:8, which reads, in the NKJV, "But now you yourselves are to put off all these: anger, malice, blasphemy, filthy language out of your mouth." The NET Bible renders it, "...abusive language from your mouth." The ESV has, "...obscene talk..."

What exactly is a "corrupt word" or an "unwholesome word" or "corrupting talk?" What exactly is "filthy talking" or "abusive language" or "obscene talk?"There are a lot of people who seem to think it's the content of George Carlin's infamous list of the words you can't say on TV. I don't think it's quite that simple.

It's fairly obvious that when writing in Greek, Paul wasn't spending a lot of time thinking about Anglo-Saxonisms that hadn't yet been invented.

It's fairly obvious that it's not the objective meaning of the words that is being referred to. You can say, for example, "manure" without anyone in the world accusing you of cussing, right?

Some folks--including some for whose opinions I generally have very high regard--make an argument that basically amounts to this: Every culture has a list of words that are commonly accepted as being foul. We all know what they are and what they are used for, and it is to this list, at least in part, that Paul refers. Therefore, Christians shouldn't use the words on the list. And to a degree, I agree. There are indeed words that are commonly accepted as foul, the recognized use of which for many, maybe even most people, is to express displeasure, anger, hatred, bitterness, and so forth, precisely the things listed in Col. 3:8. But I do have a small problem with this idea: the list isn't universal, not even within the same country. It changes. It changes over time--I can easily think of words that were completely unacceptable 20 years ago that I now hear on family tv and radio. It changes with age--there are some words that I would never have gotten away with when I was five that nobody would bat an eye at were I to use them as an adult. It changes with your company--please believe me, Marines routinely use words that most people would consider foul with no hostile or foul intent whatsoever, considering them merely, as Spongebob might say, "spicy sentence enhancers." It changes with your education and level of knowledge--as shown in the sanitarian's example given above. And it changes with your personal background--I know more than a few people from rural backgrounds that think nothing of talking of pig ---- or cow ----, etc. To them, it is simply something you shovel out of the barn.

Personally, I think that to get a good sense of what "a corrupt word," "corrupting talk," "unwholesome words," "filthy language," "abusive language," and "obscene talk" are, you have to look to the context of the Scripture. To my mind, that sort of language is language that corrupts a person, imparts nothing good, expresses (perhaps especially intentionally) anger, malice, and so forth. It is language that is intended to hurt or to degrade, and while people may and often do use words on "the list" to do these things, it is not a word's presence on "the list" that makes it foul, but the way it is used.

Having said all that, I still avoid the words on the list. I do that because so many people, hearing them, automatically assume less than wholesome intent on the part of the speaker, and I don't wish to unnecessarily upset anyone. But I have a hard time, a very hard time indeed, coming down on anyone just for using words on the list.

Before I do that, I need to know if they're cussing or if they're communicating. Are they trying to abuse or degrade or offend me, or is that simply the way the people around them talk?

You savvy?

And don't get me started on "minced oaths." When people not only don't want you to use the words on the list-of-words-that-we-as-a-culture-have-agreed-are-foul, but don't wish you to use words on the list-of-words-that-we-as-a-culture-have-agreed-are-socially-acceptable-substitutes, it seems to me that a double standard is being exposed.

Just my two cents, y'know?