Rich Lowry In Riyadh

So Arizona's governor stopped the religious bigots from throwing gays out into the freezing snow or something like that. At least that's how the press has been covering the whole thing. Rich Lowry has an excellent article in Politico discussing both Governor Brewer's veto of the religious freedom act and the media coverage of it.

Rich is cogent, accurate and right on target. He's also missing the point. Here's a sample.

For The New York Times editorial board, the bill was “A License to Discriminate.” It constituted “the legalizing of anti-gay prejudice,” according to a piece in U.S.News & World Report. It was, Salon scoffed, “cartoonishly bigoted.” A reference to Jim Crow was obligatory in any discussion of the bill on cable TV.

Writing in The Week, Elizabeth Stoker said the logic of the bill “threatens to twist Christianity into a vile, exclusionary isolating thing...”

There was no such thing in the proposed law. It's just extending religious freedom to businesses as Rich so ably describes.

In addition to the federal government, 18 states have such statutes and about a dozen other states interpret their state constitutions as extending the same protections, according to the letter. The statutes, the scholars write, “say that before government can burden a person’s religious exercise, the government has to show a compelling justification.”

Still, Rich is missing the point. My Cursillo friends were equally upset by the coverage of the bill and how it was totally mischaracterized as anti-gay. Of course it was. What did you expect?

If you lived in Riyadh, you wouldn't be surprised if all of the media outlets interpreted the news through an Islamic filter. You would never expect them to look at things the same way a non-Muslim would. It's not in their nature as the Saudi kingdom is an Islamic state and won't tolerate apostates.

America is rapidly becoming a religious state as well. Fascist nations or nations on the road to fascism always end up encompassing religious doctrines. They have to as they gather up every aspect of your life under the control of the State. I've blogged before about the progressives being a religious movement. That's exactly what's at work here.

For the progressives who make up most of the mainstream media, the proposed law in Arizona was the equivalent of uncovering the women of Riyadh. It doesn't matter if some of them are dying of heat stroke or if there are other valid reasons for it. It is wrong for religious reasons and there is no way such an effort would be covered with any degree of fairness.

So while the coverage of the law was unjust, it was certainly illuminating. It was exactly what you'd expect from a nation evolving into a (secular) theocracy.

Update: From the Wikipedia article on Freedom of religion in Saudi Arabia:

The Government prohibits the public practice of other religions but the government generally allows private practice of non-Muslim religions.

And here, slightly edited to fit Obama's America:

The Government prohibits the public practice of many Christian, Jewish and Muslim religions but the government generally allows private practice of religion.

Overcoming Guilt So That You Can Keep Sinning

There are four things you need to know for this to make sense.

First, our Maximum Leader is fed out of a dish that lies on the first level of her cat tree. She's getting old and her arthritis makes it difficult for her to go up much higher with ease, so we leave it on the first level.

Second, the smaller Catican Guard loves cat food. I think it's just because it's different, so for her, cat food is a treat. 

Third, the smaller Guard is not allowed on the cat tree. After all, she is the Guard and our Maximum Leader is, well, our Maximum Leader. There are High Holy Places which are off limits to all but her. The cat tree is one such place. The smaller Guard knows this.

Fourth, after about 15 years together, our Maximum Leader and I have come to an understanding that she is allowed one snack each night at the time of her choosing. It maybe midnight, one, two, three fifteen, whenever. The smaller Guard knows this as well.

Every night, I'm awakened by Her Serene Furriness and we go downstairs together, after some ritual lovin's at the top of the stairs, and she gets her snack. I return to bed and witness the same struggle each time. The smaller Guard, who sleeps in our bed as befitting a Catican Guard of any size, tries to remain calm. Then she gets up and begins the licking spasms that are the telltale sign of agitation. Then she wanders a bit around the bed as if she's looking for a more comfortable spot.

And then she leaps off the bed and heads downstairs to hop up on the first level of the cat tree and see if our Maximum Leader has left any nuggets behind.

Temptation - a battle with the conscience lost - sin.

Certainly this is a nightly metaphor for our own struggles with evil. 

Well, until I simply close the door on the way back from the night time snack so no one can leave the bedroom. That takes care of that whole sin problem right there.

Um, Where Is Ukraine's Money Going To Come From?

... and why did I end my title a preposition with?

From today's WSJ:

The Obama administration worked Sunday with the European Union to forge a much-needed financial bailout of Ukraine, but also extended an olive branch to Russia by inviting it to join the effort.

Emphasis mine for obvious reasons.

Ukraine is reported to have a serious debt problem, but it looks to be about 1/5 of Japan's.

Source: tradingeconomics.com

Their lending rate is really high, though.

Source: tradingeconomics.com

There's no question that something nasty has been going on in the Ukrainian economy leading to unrest. It's fortunate that we can still print money and hand it out. When the ability to do that comes to an end, places that go up in flames like Ukraine did last week are going to be on their own.

Leave It To Beaver, Circa 2013

So last night, a couple of residents of the Catican Compound watched Dallas Buyers Club. It starts with a redneck having sex with a prostitute. Shortly thereafter, said redneck discovers he has contracted AIDS, upon learning which he launches into all kinds of anti-gay profanity. Here's how the description at IMDb starts:

Dallas 1985. Electrician and sometimes rodeo bull rider Ron Woodroof lives hard, which includes heavy smoking, drinking, drug use (primarily cocaine) and casual sex. He is a stereotypical redneck: racist and homophobic.

I checked out at that point and wandered off to watch some soccer-on-demand. Specifically, Tottenham vs. Dnipro in the Europa Cup competition. It was pretty poor stuff as the Dnipro pitch looked like they'd be grazing cows on it right before game time.

Still, watching the cows graze would have been more interesting than one more Hollywood production where the Redneck Encounters Diversity The Hard Way. A few minutes in and you could tell where it was going with the same accuracy as a Leave It To Beaver episode. I popped my head back in briefly to see a scene where a gay dude with AIDS was talking to a nurse. Unlike Nasty Redneck, he was charming and clever. Well, OK then.

So in the end, Wally and Beaver realize that lying about breaking Mrs. Johnson's mailbox wasn't a good idea and they pool their paper route money to replace it. Well, either that or the redneck learns about open mindedness and brings medicine to everyone. It's a true story, so it's all OK that it plays perfectly into the stereotypes of rednecks quoted above.

Of course, Camden is a true story, too, but that's something way too icky to show in the movies. No, we'd better stick to explicit redneck-prostitute sex scenes so we don't offend our viewers.

Right, Beav?

Debt Creates Bad Habits

... and if it creates bad habits in individuals, imagine what it's doing to our nation.

This is another post wherein I argue that our issues as a nation are cultural, not political.

I've had friends who have gone through short sales. That's where you owe more on your house than it's worth and can no longer make the payments. One in particular ran up credit card debt at the same time. They weren't buying necessities, they were just partying until the party had to stop because they ran out of lenders willing to lend to them. They knew all of the best restaurants and entertainment hot spots. They knew way more of these than I do.

When the jig was up, they didn't have the emotional resources and good habits necessary to cope with their problems. Everything was someone else's fault. Their kids were old enough to work and contribute to the family, but that option was never considered. Eating cheaply became a necessary chore rather than an opportunity for creativity. Nothing was born with grace or stoicism.

These habits grew over time as they spent money they hadn't earned. Effectively, they were grown adults who were spoiled children.

What happens to a nation that lives like this? What happens to a society that can vote for money to be handed out and have it appear out of thin air?

My friend is impractical and learning practical things has never been their bag.

When Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, goes off on student loan debt or how expensive college is, I wonder how it is we got to this point. Allow me to suggest that it is easy credit for a decade or more that got us here. Impractical degrees earned with borrowed money sounds a lot like my friend.

Student loan debt has a longer time horizon than credit card debt so you can postpone the day of reckoning for a long, long time, incubating your bad habits. Source.

Home Depot Is Irrelevant

According to Forbes,

Home Depot has the highest tax rate of any non-oil company on this list.

• Income tax expense: $2.7 billion
• Net income: $4.5 billion
• Effective tax rate: 37.2%.

According to Bloomberg,

The Federal Open Market Committee said yesterday it will cut monthly bond purchases by $10 billion to $65 billion.

The Fed creates this much in "tax revenues": $65B x 12 =  $780B.

Home Depot is this much of the Fed in terms of "tax revenues": 2.7 / 780 = 0.00346.

In other words, Home Depot, a monstrous chain of retail home improvement stores, has tax contributions less than 0.35% of what the Fed creates out of thin air. Home Depot is effectively a rounding error when it comes to the income calculations of the politicians. There's an air of unreality to the whole affair when a company like Home Depot is effectively meaningless compared to the fantasy numbers created by the whim of the Fed.

Peggy Noonan has noticed the results.

“House of Cards” very famously does nothing to enhance Washington’s reputation. It reinforces the idea that the capital has no room for clean people. The earnest, the diligent, the idealistic, they have no place there...I guess they think they’re showing they’re in on the joke and hip to the culture. I guess they think they’re impressing people with their surprising groovelocity...

But it’s all vaguely decadent, no? Or maybe not vaguely. America sees Washington as the capital of vacant, empty souls, chattering among the pillars...

We’re at a funny point in our political culture. To have judgment is to be an elitist. To have dignity is to be yesterday. To have standards is to be a hypocrite—you won’t always meet standards even when they’re your own, so why have them?

Why have them, indeed. After all, the money they spend isn't coming from those pathetic, honest, homely rubes who go to work every day ...

Killing Jesus

One of my Cursillo brothers gave me Bill O'Reilly's Killing Jesus for Christmas. I just finished it a few days ago and I absolutely loved it. The book takes a historical view of the events, intertwining Roman and Jewish history leading up to the crucifixion. I don't have much time to do a full review, so I'll keep this short.

I won't hear the Gospel reading or attend Mass the same way ever again. In addition to showing how events were unfolding around the life of Jesus and the way in which He avoided the heresy traps laid for him time and again by the Jewish priests, it gives you a good view into the life of the common Jew at the time. That last was the most potent part of the book for me. How the disciples didn't just fade into the crowds after the crucifixion is itself a miracle. Given the all-powerful nature of the Roman state and the way in which Caiaphas' people were cooperating with the Romans, I'd have been heading for the hills after Jesus' death if I'd been a disciple.

It makes you understand the importance of Pentecost, no question about it. I highly recommend the book.

Fine Cooking For The Win!

Interested in learning a bit of the science behind cooking with butter, I came across finecooking.com. I've tried two articles - one on butter and the other on potatoes - and it looks to be outstanding! The articles are informative and written at a level everyone can understand. I've tried to read articles and blog posts from scientific cooking aficionados, but I've never been able to hack my way through the prose. Fine Cooking threads the needle just right.

I just thought I'd share. Enjoy!

Update: I just learned that I've been cleaning my cast iron skillets the wrong way. I'd been blasting them with steel wool SOS pads to get the things good and clean. Bad move. Here's how you do it:

Caring for cast iron is easier than you think. It’s all about keeping that seasoning intact. There are basically three steps: washing, drying, and coating with oil. Because detergents can degrade the seasoning, I simply wash my skillet out with hot water and a sponge or a natural- or nylon-bristle brush—never a scouring pad and never, ever in the dishwasher. If food sticks, a soak in hot water usually does the trick.

Harmonic Convergence

Having soaked in the Hot Tub of Debt Blogging and worked at Catholic Charities giving food to the poor, here's a scenario that I can't get out of my head: Cuts to government employee pensions hitting at the same time that the Catholic Church is slashing services to deal with attacks from the government and gay activists.

It could happen and pretty easily at that.

Here's part one.

(Reuters) - Detroit has circulated a financial plan that requires significant concessions from its pension funds and bondholders and declares that an interest-rate obligation that helped drive the city into bankruptcy is a disputed claim that is not part of the settlement.

Part two can be seen in the government assault on Little Sisters of the Poor and gays successfully suing various traditionalist wedding vendors like bakeries and photographers.

Increasing the number of needy elderly while wiping out organizations that serve them can't be a good combination.

The Verb Tenses Tell The Story

So I was doing a little web clickery, looking up food deserts - places, mostly urban, where supermarkets are scarce or nonexistent. I came across this beard-stroker of an article in which the well-meaning author seems mystified about the reasons urban residents don't have access to decent food. The article was practically worthless, but the comments were a gold mine.

As I read through the comments, the same theme came up over and over again, well represented by the excerpt below. The content was great, if a bit ragged in the grammar and punctuation, but more telling were the verb tenses and the flow of time implicit in the prose.

If you have ever been to Trenton New Jersey you would find no Grocery stores there. They all moved out because of the robbery's and murders. That is a state capital too. Looks like a war zone. All the good people have left the city and the state for better places to live and raise their families. I am sure that this is something that is happening all over America today.

 "(A)ll moved out" and "have left" are the tip offs. If you go back in time, it appears that Trenton did not have food deserts. If you go back in time, Trenton didn't have out-of-control illegitimacy rates, either. Hmm.

The Ultimate Valentine's Day Gift

... is, without a doubt, a rusty, possibly non-functional, 1955 Filter Queen Model 500, "Golden Monarch" vacuum cleaner, scrounged for free from a room full of ancient scrap equipment.

How can I go wrong when I give my lovely bride a gift called a "Golden Monarch?" It will make her feel like a queen!

Yep, I'm a regular Romeo. You guys out there can feel free to leave a comment if you need some more tips from Mr. Smooth. Me, I'm going to go soak up some of that good lovin' I so richly deserve.

Cheezburger of the Day

This one was created by yours truly from this tweet. 

The cat looks angry, but our Maximum Leader looks that way, too, even when she's totally happy and wants affection. Considering their proximity and how relaxed everyone is, the cat is probably thinking something like, "I love Mr. Doggy soooo much!"

Still, the facial expressions were too good to pass up.  :-)

"I Am Not A Witch Or A Bird"

So says Argentinian President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner as she fights off evil speculators.

Following a video conference from Government House, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner slammed the “speculative sectors” who “want to see us flying through the air”, and urged local politicians to help in the implementation of the Precios Cuidados program.

“I will not fly away because I am not a witch, nor a bird,” expressed Fernández de Kirchner, responding to “companies who tried to destabilize” the Federal Government.

Not a witch or a bird. Right. Well, it's a good thing we've got that out of the way. In case you were wondering, the Precios Cuidados program is the government's latest rules regarding prices on all kinds of items such as food and household goods. Precios Cuidados has been a big success, if by big success you mean it resulted in nothing for sale.

And so it goes with social justice fascism. Market forces have been thwarted once more and we've confirmed that the president is not a witch or a bird.

You might find empty shelves at the store, but at least neither of these were President Kirchner.

Odds And Ends On My Eighth Blogiversary

Today's my eighth blogiversary. Yay me! What started out as an effort to make some extra money has ended up as a colossal waste of time.

Just kidding. It's been enlightening for me. Probably dry and dull for you, but don't say you weren't warned*.

I'm down with a cold right now, so instead of some grand post summarizing the year which would bore you to tears, here are a few observations which will only bore you to a vague sense of melancholy and ennui.

Yellin's Testimony - In words, it was: "We're in unusual times and we must keep printing money!" In reality, the times are not all that unusual. No bank runs, no monster lines at soup kitchens, no major wars. Her position amounts to, "Now that we've started down this road, we can't figure out how to get off of it." The money printing will continue. Stocks will continue to rise. Until Japan folds. Then all bets are off.

Irregular Blogging - Up until recently, I had been blogging every day. Family commitments forced me to direct my energy elsewhere and I had to let go of the daily blogging routine. It was hard at first, but it's become easier over time. It helps that I'm a very backwater blog.

Twitter Cesspools - A couple of times this week, I dove into some Twitter streams that were horrific. One was an LGBT activist and the other a militant atheist. Well, that's what they called themselves. In point of fact, they were just potty-mouthed sociopaths. The further I dug through their streams and friends, the more potty-mouthed sociopaths I found. I'm not sure what to do with them. I follow a ton of Catholics on Twitter and comparing the two streams are shockingly different. I'm just not sure how to illustrate it without becoming a target, both on line and in person. These are very nasty people indeed.

Twitter Cesspools, 2 - When you got past the viciousness and filth, it seemed to me that what the sociopaths didn't like about religion in general and Catholicism in particular were the rules. They didn't want anyone telling them what to do. Defining sin in any way, shape or form was enough to drive them to, well, sin. Violent, hateful sin, if you get my drift. That was it. Let them go feral and they'll be fine. In fact, a feral subculture might be a good way to describe it.

Hmm. Feral subcultures on Twitter. That might be something worth exploring.

Catholic Charities - Last time I worked, we had about 6 Muslim women in full burkas show up to receive free food from the infidels**. One asked for pasta in their order, so I gave them this. As an LSU fan and South-o-phile, I look forward to hearing rebel ululations. :-)

And that wraps up another year of blogging. Thanks for reading and thanks for commenting. I have a good time doing this and it means a lot when you respond.

God bless you all.

* - In all honestly, you weren't warned. Go ahead. Say it.

** - They were pretty decent people. They were a trifle fussy and didn't say, "Thank you," but some don't. On the whole, I give them a 4 out of 10 on the Customer Scale.

Not For Sale

Doommonger extraordinaire, Tyler Durden, has an interesting post on the collapse of the Argentinian economy due to their social justice fascism and borrowing and printing and spending. The interesting part is not the doom and gloom, but the mechanics of life under hyperinflation. It's not that prices are going up, it's that nothing is for sale. Tyler includes an interview between Chris Martenson and Fernando Aguirre wherein lies the payoff.

Chris Martenson:  So 100%, 20% inflation; are those yearly numbers?

Fernando Aguirre:  Those are our numbers in a matter of days. In just one day, for example, cement in Balcarce, one of the towns in Southern Argentina, went up 100% overnight, doubling in price. Grocery stores in Córdoba, even in Buenos Aires, people are talking about increase of prices of 20, 30% just these days. I actually have family in Argentina that are telling me that they go to a hardware store and they aren't even able to buy stuff from there because stores want to hold on and see how prices unfold in the following days.

Chris Martenson:  Right. So this is one of those great mysteries of inflation. It is obviously 'flying money', so everyone is trying to get rid of their money. You would think that would actually increase commerce. But if you are on the other end of that transaction, if you happen to be the business owner, you have every incentive to withhold items for as long as possible. So one of the great ironies, I guess, is that even though money is flying around like crazy, goods start to disappear from the shelves.

When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Why sell a power drill for $60 today when you can get $75 for it tomorrow? Plus, the money you receive in return is worth appreciably less every day. It only makes sense to sell something when you need some cash right then.

Deriving Christianity

Kay Hymowitz has an article in the NYT detailing how single motherhood hurts kids. I had some snarky fun at her expense on Twitter.

@WilcoxNMP @KayHymowitz @RichardvReeves Aren't you complicating things? It's easy to get laid. Sex makes babies. Parenting is hard. #duh
— K T Cat (@ktcat) February 8, 2014

@WilcoxNMP @KayHymowitz @RichardvReeves You know, the Church has had this thing dialed in for about 2000 years. Crazy, no? ;-)
— K T Cat (@ktcat) February 8, 2014

http://t.co/sakbK4OOdX in which sober sociologists discover what @catholicscoutz could have told you after a fifth of JD + a case of Schlitz
— K T Cat (@ktcat) February 8, 2014

I picked Catholic Boy Scout, @catholicscoutz, because he was the most ludicrous person I could think of to knock back a bottle of Jack Daniels and finish off a case of Schlitz. Having said that, the point remains. These thumbsucking policy wonkathons examining massive data sets just seem like so much time wasting. It's a bunch of Ivy League wieners sitting around their faculty lounges, coming to the shocking conclusion that married parent families are superior when we've known this for 2000 years.

The sociologists are gradually deriving partial Christianity from hopelessly tangled and incomplete data sets.

Whatever they come up with, it will be insufficient to substantially change things for the reasons I laid out yesterday. The policy wonks offer up evidence of Christian truth, but leave out its transcendent nature. They tell the young woman who is being seduced by her boyfriend, "You are 37% more likely to end up in poverty. Don't do it!" When formulated that way, it makes the counterargument trivial. "You don't understand. (Jamal, Joey, Jose) isn't like that. We're different. Our love is real!"

If you're prone to making bad life decisions or if you're just in a particularly weak moment, policy wonks have no power of persuasion at all. Policy wonkiness combined with faith is considerably stronger. "You are 37% more likely to end up in poverty. Plus, God says it's a sin. Don't do it!" Faith provides the deeper, emotional roadblock to bad decisions. The girl's reply of "Our love is real!" is easily countered by what we redneck Christians teach our kids - "If the boy's love for you is real, he'll wait. Someone who loves you won't help you sin." We put the boy's love to God's test.

Having surrendered to the secular world, the sociologists don't do that at all. They've got the mechanics of Christianity, but none of its power.

Good luck with that.

That Sort Of Thing Just Isn't Done

I've got a much longer post rumbling around in my noggin, but I keep making a hash of the prose, so I'll write a short one with the same point.

Recently, we had a customer come in for food at Catholic Charities sporting a $100+ fingernail paint job. It was awesome, but clearly a stupid decision for someone in that position.

People make stupid decisions all the time. Sometimes we pay a small price, like when drink too much and end up with a hangover. Sometimes we and others pay a really big price, like when we sleep with someone we ought not and that union bears a child.

Logic doesn't do a very complete job of preventing stupidity. We're rationalizing creatures, not rational ones, hence the $100+ nail job. What feels good often trumps what makes sense, which is why we sometimes drink way more booze than we should.

If the culture doesn't dissuade you from stupid, if the culture reinforces stupid, you're going to get lots more stupid. The Victorian cliche, "That sort of thing just isn't done, old boy" in reference to illicit behavior, was the culture trying to dissuade you from stupid.

When we decided to drop objective morality and judgmental attitudes, we unleashed a whole lot of stupid.

A Little Peter Gunn For You

I used this music in a video I made for work yesterday and just couldn't help sharing it with you. Enjoy!

Give Them Clothes And Lawyers

... and you get the people suing Catholics* and Catholic institutions over gay marriage issues.

Pro-abortion protesters in Spain attacking a Catholic bishop.

In a courtroom, surrounded by lawyers and dressed properly, almost anyone will look sane, serious and respectable.

There are more and more of these people all the time and the Church, unlike the government, doesn't have infinite resources. Some number of these nuts have always been around, but with recent court rulings against Catholic businesses and wiping out elections like Proposition 8, they've grown bolder. As well they should. The rewards for attacking us are getting better all the time.

If you're a libertarian and think we social conservatives are just so much chaff that can be abandoned to crazies like these, read this. Here are just a few of the payoff tidbits.

Who is challenging Obamacare and on what grounds? Are the libertarians waging lawfare against it? Not effectively, but the Green family and the Catholic Church are. Who are they? Social conservatives. They’re fighting one of the most egregious assaults on personal liberty in a century, on religious freedom grounds. And they have the best standing chance of at least rolling back Obamacare’s attack on religious conscience — an attack, by the way, that libertarians mostly ignore. If they win, though, some measure of liberty will be restored — without the help of libertarians...

The fact is, telling us social cons to shut up is a recipe for demoralizing and destroying the GOP at its base. It would take the cornerstone of the Right out of the movement. Coastal libertarians are not the base of the Republican Party. They don’t man phone banks (sorry for being gender normative there), they don’t conduct block walks, they don’t even usually run for office. They can’t even build a viable movement in their own states. They tend to just tell the rest of us why we’re wrong, when we’re doing those organizational things that make the party tick and give it some power. The lectures are getting old. Tell me that California’s Republicans have a single useful thing to offer Texas’ Republicans. Go ahead.

Did I mention that some solitary loon, like the deranged women in the video above, managed to get the Mt. Soledad cross taken down even though it took years and years in court? The attacks on the Church don't have to be organized or even effective. They just need to be numerous, relentless and dismissed as unimportant by the general population. With us out of the way, the fascists will only have to deal with the libertarians.

Have fun standing against that machine alone, guys.

* - There are a lot of people fighting for traditional marriage, not just Catholics. I used the Church as a shorthand for all such allies because I couldn't think of a way to describe the general group without making a hash of the prose.

Beyonce With The Sound Off

I challenge you to watch Beyonce's performance at the recent Grammys with the sound off and see what you think. I did and immediately thought of Sister Clare's blog post, And the Grammy Goes to ... Satan!

Two other things crossed my mind. First, with the sound off, the performance looks like something from a low-budget Roger Corman teen sexploitation film. Something that would be called "The Devil's Prom Night" or "Demons Within." Beyonce's "dance" is utterly artless. It's the Reefer Madness of sexuality.

Second, back when I was dating, any woman who dressed or behaved within three standard deviations* of this would have instantly been labeled as desperate and for good reason. I would suggest that things haven't changed. When I read about the hook-up culture, the amount of porn being consumed, the number of babies born to single women, it sure looks to me like all kinds of women are desperate.

Oh well, it's probably just part of social conservatives' War on Women. Just to be safe, let's bankrupt the Little Sisters of the Poor in support of free IUDs. That should fix things.

* - I'm sure Beyonce's deviations are not standard. They probably involve power tools, vats of industrial lubricants, live scorpions and dead marsupials.

Let's Face It, Being An Insurgent Is More Fun

I've got some blog posts percolating around discussing the Grammys with Beyonce desperate for male attention in her thong teddy, yakking about the government infrastructure coming down like a ton of bricks on Little Sisters of the Poor and a total meatball served by my buddies at the Monastery of Miscellaneous Musings.

http://t.co/6jIIXd9lhK To my favorite moral scold, @ktcat ... have at it, my man!
— Dean R. Riehm (@deanriehm) January 26, 2014

To tell you the truth, I'm not in the mood for that. I've got a Firestone Union Jack past my molars and am working on a Newcastle Brown. The lads lost to hated Sunderland today, but that was no surprise having sold their best player, Yohan Cabaye, because their owner uses the team like an ATM*. (For the love of God, why can't we have an owner whose mortal sin is Pride instead of Greed?) Anyways, I'm feeling pretty good and would have a hard time besting beloved Renee or Sister Clare without strong doses of caffeine when it comes to moral scoldery.

So let's see what we can do fortified with such as we are.

Soon, if not already, Christians across the US will realize that we're the counter-cultural insurgency. The hedonists have ... what? A "war on women" whose goal is to get government-subsidized insurance conglomerates to pay for their Drospirenone so they can get pronged by guys who live with their parents? Yeah, you guys are really on the cutting edge of social revolution. You're sticking it to the Man! Err, actually, the man is sticking it to you.

Losers.

Those of us on the side of prudery are the real hipsters. We're the ones who are really flipping off the System. We're Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Hunter S. Thompson, we're freaking Sid Viscious. You? You're Robert Young from Father Knows Best. You're squaresville. You're oatmeal without raisins.

Yep, the cross is coming down of Mt. Soledad. People are losing their businesses for the sake of their faith. Nuns are getting persecuted by the government.

This is going to be fun. After all, we've got the cool music.

You've got this. If songs about verbal porn are the best you can do, you're screwed.

* - Newcastle's season went from something magical to something dreadful with the loss of Cabaye. Instead finishing in the top 7 and going to the Europa tournament next year with fantasies of Champions League (top 4), we'll be lucky to finish 15th. Even the San Diego Padres wouldn't do that. Pathetic.