Nothing else matters

I feel this way about Pro-Life. The idea for this blog has been gnawing at me for some time now and I expressed it once before and it is this: let's say conservatives got everything they ever dreamed of and then some but that abortion and euthanasia were still the law of the land and was to be forevermore for me at least this would be a spiritually empty victory. In fact I feel so strongly about this that it is reason enough for me to stop blogging since what good is talking about all the other stuff if we don't have a pro-life culture first? For me it's as if having a pro-life society would free us up to consider more fully and less distractedly these other important parts of the conservative agenda but without this what good is all the rest? For the record I will continue to blog probably until the day the Good Lord calls me home but am just emphasizing how passionate some of us are about the issue.

Nothing else really matters if you have an event that in pro-life terms is such a tragedy, a kind of moral catastrophe and this may or may not help to explain the mystery of the "retired" bloggers or at least some of them, not everything at your heart's core gets expressed in print, and speaking for myself I've often considered not blogging or retiring from blogging since the pro-life issues are so much on the back-burner these days. I mean how can we even talk about Obama the Socialist let alone concentrate fully on this issue and others like it when as I said there's been so many recent horrors on the pro-life front?

I really think there needs to be something so newsworthy in pro-life terms, some event so positive and of such moral magnitude that it will rock us back to our collective senses, make us rethink our attitudes towards the unborn, the disabled and the elderly, the poor, the downtrodden, the voiceless, the totally vulnerable among us. To continue on this pro-abortion/pro-euthanasia arc is so depressing that what good is all the rest of what we ever dreamed or fantasized about if we still continue down this destructive course?

Today's blog is simply a lament, to explain a thorn that's been in my side for awhile now before I continue to blog about the Other Important Issues of the Day. It's just something for your consideration.

Personal autonomy, where libs and cons differ

I'm gonna break this down in porn terms but apply it to the abortion debate. Philosophically where do you come down on this issue of personal autonomy? Take a young woman who decides to become a porn star. That in and of itself shows a totally autonomous decision, a decision many of us are not even capable of. What it says is I don't care what my mother and father think, if I embarrass them, what my family and friends think, what my pastor thinks, what my neighborhood thinks, what society-at-large thinks. I would go so far as to say it's not the right decision, a very poor decision but a totally autonomous decision. On some level you have to admire if that's the right word the sheer audacity of the decision. So here's the issue: is it more important for a decision to be the right one or a totally autonomous one? For a decision to be the right one you have to take into consideration other factors besides your own personal autonomy, for instance how will this affect my family, my standing in the community, my career and a myriad of other factors. The totally autonomous decision-maker says I'm gonna do what's right for me. So for a liberal or perhaps the better word is libertarian the totally autonomous decision is also the right decision, the two are interchangeable by the sheer fact of it being autonomously made. For the conservative, the socially conservative ones anyway, the right decision and the totally autonomous decision are not one and the same thing, indeed the latter smacks of moral relativism because YOU are the sole arbiter of Right and Wrong. As applied to abortion the fact of someone practicing total autonomy is the attractive feature here, it's very Randian, but to not consider other factors would seem to show the lack of a complete decision. So where do YOU come down on this issue of personal autonomy? it's not so much the wrongness of the decision that is of importance here but the fact that you can make it freely without undue societal and religious pressures, that's the libertarian position anyway. I can kind of guess soapie's position on the matter but maybe some things are deeper than any one philosophy can offer. I'm in a philosophical frame of mind.

The philosopher class

Lately I've been watching this special on Immanuel Kant on NJN2, some Harvard professor named Michael Sandel giving the lecture. Exciting class, kids all look interested, lots of Asian faces. Like my friend and I were talking, you're in Barnes & Noble and there's some hot Asian chicks in the cafe studying who won't even give you the time of day because their parents have used YOU as an example of what not to wind up to be in Life, you're a walking warning in your Dockers and Reeboks stimulating their studies. There's just something about You, you give off the stench of a low-wage job and don't seem confident. You pass a chick in a department store and your eyes wander and then she notices and buttons up that top button, you must be giving off a stalker vibe or something. Interesting stuff as when we are told that Kant thought it always wrong to lie so if a murderer knocks on your front door and asks if your friend is in there you have to tell him the truth, give up your buddy, something to do with you can't make exceptions to the categorical imperative. Philosophy usually takes weird turns every now and then like when I was in Catholic high school our professor talked about solipsism a Greek word which basically means there's no objective reality outside of your own mind which means that nothing else exists, you just imagined it all which if true then why the hell did I get up to go to work these past 25 years? You can't blame it all on the acid, that didn't come until 1938 but you did have your morning glory seeds, the heavenly blues so don't know if some of the Thinkers accidentally ever swallowed some. I was thinking about the nature of dreams the other day, what are they exactly? Now we all know that dreams ain't real but they do exist on some level otherwise you wouldn't have dreamt. Put another way a dream happened somewhere, it took place in your mind, your imagination which has its own existence so if it makes you feel any better maybe Kim Cattrall really did kiss you au naturel in the kitchen. Arthur Schopenhauer, said to lead the philosophical school of thought known as Pessimism. What I wanna know is did the philosphers ever work a day in their lives? hold down your typical 9-5's or did they just think all day? We've all heard "if a tree falls in a forest and there's nobody around does it make a noise?" and along these lines what's the deal with this tinnitus-type state? I mean the noise is real to me, what am I nuts? Maybe I'm gonna give my two weeks at work and spend the next few years pondering the finer points of Life but getting back to dreams if you work in your dreams as I do shouldn't you get paid for it? Maybe we're all dead. BTW Obama ain't real folks, get over it!!

Faith systems

Along the lines of Patrick M's recent musings on faith, what faith system coincides most with our own personal belief system this is a tricky one indeed. I would go so far as to say all the official faith systems of the world don't do it and fall short for a good many of us. Born and raised a Catholic, still am, theologically very in sync but there are problems. Just to choose four issues out of a hat:

Birth control: Tried understanding the Church's position on the matter time and again, damn I tried but I think what it all boils down to is this - Sex is a fairly animalistic act when you get right down to it and the Church is trying to ennoble it, pleasure for pleasure's sake even to express love become issues so have the act be open to the transmission of human life at all times even if it means winding up with ten kids if you're the sensual type...anyway don't recall the subject even popping up in the Bible per se so I'm very Sola Scriptura on this one you could say. It's a blue moon moment, me and the Rev. Pat Robertson see eye to eye on this one.

Confession: Probably my biggest difference right now as the oldtimers accept it without question but never got the logic here - Jesus or God won't forgive you and you'll wind up eternally damned even if you're sorry as hell unless you explain in morbid detail to the priest your most personal sins and then some. Makes me instinctively uncomfortable, is there some kind of prurient interest at work here and you have to question any person or institution that says thou shalt not use your mind, put reason away and obey blindly. The priest will point to the confessional, you'll feel like a million dollars afterwards, my thing is why do you need to know?

Transubstantiation: The doctrine that when the priest at Mass consecrates the bread and wine they literally turn into the Body and Blood of our Savior. Not buying it and it has cannibalistic overtones, why can't it just be symbolic? Literalism can get you in trouble but they insist so again it's not a perfect fit.

Priestly celibacy (and hell why don't we throw in nuns too?): Doesn't seem nat'chal to me at all, why can't a woman or man bring you closer to God? Of course you could be a layman and practice what I call involuntary celibacy but I don't want to get into that right now. Valentine's Day is hard for lots of folks but at least we have it as a goal, for them the goal is illegal.

So call me a cafeteria Catholic if you want, it seems to be the only way. Soapie HAS TO have some thoughts.

Obama has plumbed new depths

Now at first blush this is gonna sound grossly unfair to President Obama, you can just picture Bill Moyers using it to illustrate classic right-wing hate in the blogosphere on his Friday night journalfest. Well let me first link up Malcontent's excellent commentary today on the matter:

http://malcontentralphie.blogspot.com/2010/02/this-is-not-joke.html

Glenn Beck talked about it this morning on his radio program and I'm gonna predict this is gonna be a HOT TOPIC in the conservative blogosphere and why shouldn't it be? There was a DNC fundraiser last night in where else? Washington DC and Obama made the point that a national health-care system is still dear to his heart worth fighting for and then he talked about a letter he received concerning a young woman, 41 years old, who worked for his campaign while fighting breast cancer for four years and finally succumbed as he put it. You see she had no health insurance, couldn't afford the tests that could have saved her life but here's the kicker and I'm quoting Obama here: "and she insisted she's going to be buried in an Obama t-shirt."

Malcontent's point, she worked for his campaign so as a campaign worker why didn't they pay for her health insurance thus saving this poor woman's life? Now here's my dark thought and I'm not afraid to express it though I usually don't go down this road: they wanted this young woman to die, hell they could've gotten one of their Hollywood buddies like George Clooney to pick up the tab. It's a kind of variation of Rahm Emanuel's let no crisis go to waste, let no death be in vain when it can be used for political purposes. Does this seem harsh to you my judgement here?? not when you consider that some people deliberately use a moral calculus of let someone or a few people die for the Greater Good, think of all the future lives that could be saved. It's utilitarianism with a Machiavellian spin. It's only one life and think of the tremendous political gain to be reaped!

It's creepy, it's perverted, it's evil but it doesn't surprise in the least. Imagine if Ronald Reagan had said "she's going to be buried in a Ronald Reagan t-shirt", it would have diminished the man and it goes without saying that the liberals would have had a field day. Obama has corrupted rational political discourse in this country which in itself is a feat, the whole thing is shocking in its banality and predictability. It's far worse than anything Bill Clinton ever did while in office imo and that's saying something so shame on the Obama Administration!!!

Catcher in the Rye - some thoughts

He died this past Wednesday on January the 27th at the ripe old age of 91 (LSD founder Albert Hoffman had him beat by a few years) so Catcher's in the news again. The novel has passed the test of time although I had an English professor in college once who said it was ok but he didn't know what all the fuss was about. Since we've been talking about it since 1951 when it was first published clearly author J.D. Salinger tapped into something but WHAT exactly? something in the existential ether. Clearly when even the psychos liked your work you've struck a chord (Mark David Chapman and John Hinckley were said to have carried copies to their missions) which is another thing, what to do when psychos enjoy reading your work and get something out of it? ain't exactly the best blurbs to put on your jacket. In fact if the novel were written or updated for today's world it'd be not just everyone's a f*n phony but everyone's a psycho like lately I've noticed that anybody who disagrees with me in my day-to-day is just a wee bit too serious. Take today at work, the bakery guy goes don't take my trays, you have your own which in and of itself is a perfectly valid point but it's the way he said it, getting in your face until like my friend says you're looking for something to defend yourself with should the need arise, can I throw flour in his face? But anyway any resemblances with my blog to Holden Caulfield is purely coincidental. You want your themes of angst and alienation, the occasional existential meltdown it's all here so where's my literary validation?? It's been said the protagonist is a cynical outcast, that's what my library display memorializing Salinger's passing tells me but that'd be ME. I hate social obligations: as soon as I go to a wake I want to leave. It's nothing personal but I saw the dead guy already and I'm sure he'd want me to leave too. Observations on Society: like it's often the women who are the most sexual, who show the most cleavage who are most likely to call the cops should the wrong guy pursue. It's not the tits for God's sake, it's the phoniness ("madam your melons are falling off the table"). Take organized religion: the confessional is an invasion of my privacy. Why does the priest have to know what my left hand did last night? do I ask him how to make altar boy pudding? My blog comes from the heart (or the gut). I am ANGRY folks and it's everything, I can't go through a whole day without some vibe in my being getting plucked the wrong way like when you hear your boss say so-and-so doesn't like to work which is a totally wrong framing of the issue. Getting up and going to work everyday is a form of discipline, nobody except your boss insists you have to like it as long as you show up for work every day and do what's required. I don't ask the tolltaker on I-87 if he likes his job or not, it's irrelevant. There are other things...

Yes I am HE.

Liberal charity

I blogged about this back in the day but I wanna toss it around again. There was a time many years back I was really down on my luck, reached the bottom and I was looking back the other night (the spirits will do that t'ya every once in a while) and I concluded that the conservative people I knew and came across helped me out far more than my liberal brethren. Now this is purely anecdotal, it hardly passes the rigors of a scientific study but the only reason I bring it up is because these liberals that I knew proudly advertised themselves as liberals, would say things like all the money they spend to produce music videos could be put to better use like to help the homeless.

Zman (down on his luck calling a liberal he once knew): "Yeah hi (yada yada yada), I'm in a tough spot right now, any jobs in your area?"
Liberal: "I'll let you know. I have to go now, bye." (click/dial-tone)

Needless to say he never called back. The one time I was betrayed in Life involved a couple liberal people (not that most liberals betray but they're constantly tooting their own horns about how much more virtuous they are than conservatives). Some conclusions: maybe we are not the Sum Total of our political philosophies. TAO said something similar at his own blog the other day that maybe it doesn't really matter who's in the White House the Ship of State always seems to steer the same course, libs and conservatives once in office are kinda the same deal and I really didn't have a response at the time because I somewhat agree. The other conclusion: maybe conservatives take the Biblical mandates more seriously and the most recent study seems to bear this out, says they give to charity far more than liberals do. These libs I'm talking about strongly, passionately believed in the Welfare State yet when push came to shove wouldn't even loan you a twenty. My feelings: liberals are by now so well known for being caring, compassionate, sharing human beings that they no longer have to prove it. These lib associates of mine who never helped out, I never called them on it of course but if one were to they'd probably proudly point to their voting records when in reality they were really living the Creed of Ayn Rand.

OR maybe they don't help out conservatives down on their luck, dunno. I only mention my anecdote because it doesn't fit the usual liberal/conservative paradigm.

Sarah Palin Week & other thoughts you hear seldom expressed (if at all)

Yeah Sarah Palin Week is coming up. I know if you're a lib you're supposed to hate her and if you're a conservative you're supposed to love her but mine is a non-position just like I'm not for or against Dancing with the Stars because I don't watch it. I'm not into Sarah Palin, there's just something existential about it. I'm at the point in my life where I'm bored with alot of stuff but seems to me

we should have cured cancer first instead of impotence. Impotence is not a tragedy, it's a misfortune and folks often confuse the two. Cancer on the other hand...put it this way, how can you enjoy Sex if you're dead?? Our cultural priorities don't seem very logical but then again it'd give everyone something to talk about if you're lying there in the casket with a boner.

Can or should the act of onanism land you in Hell? Posed this once at a religion forum where I was deemed somewhat controversial but seems to me if you're gonna be damned for all Eternity you should at least have done IT with another party. I don't get Catholic theology on this one, not advocating for or against but just seeing the existential absurdity of it all. God doesn't want you, the Devil doesn't want you (you're not depraved enough) and so there must be some kind of Limbo out there for folks like porno pete.

Re Love % Romance I have alot of thoughts. Now what are the odds exactly of two people feeling exactly the same way about each other? No I'm not talking about being compatible, you both like bowling and hate Obama, you both ipod to Pink, you're both against the oral but the whole Richard Burton/Elizabeth Taylor, Antony and Cleopatra thing, a love for the ages -- "Elaine!! Elaine!!." Can you grow to love somebody? seems in most cases we have no choice, Life ain't that poetic or doesn't cooperate or whatever which if you go back in my blogging archives is one of my recurring complaints, a romantic peeve of mine. Here's the paradox although we won't admit it, the stalker's view of the universe is the correct one, it's the way Life is supposed to be, but his or her actions are wrong of course, after all as bloggers well know it's the hardest thing trying to convince someone else of your own POV although we sure as hell try. Most folks are against the happy ending, "reunited and it feels so good", and we seem to want to trudge through Life with our bad memories. Goes a long way in explaining
our divorce culture,

It's November the 15th and here in the Northeast it's balmy again. Wondering how long it will take before the rest of my conservative brethren admit maybe the Goracle just may have the smidgeon of a point, a sliver of the total picture. I don't know how to dress in the morning anymore, it's chilly at 6AM but then I find I overdressed around 2 in the afternoon. Wasn't this way in the past when this time of year was autumnal but that was in the era before global warming and the climate change stuff. We shouldn't disagree on this one anymore only question is why do we care so much? if it's 65 degrees out in January why the massive cause for alarm? Enjoy the day, I mean if you don't have cancer.

Introspection on abortion

Usually when I'm debating with a pro-choicer at some forum or blog, when things get to the boiling point and I'm driving my point home, when things get a tad too personal the opposition will throw the pejorative "self-righteous" in my face which they like to say characterizes the social right. OK I'm speaking only for myself here, can't speak for Sarah Palin, for the Rev. James Dobson, Randall Terry, Jeb Bush, just little old me. In my day to day I consider myself so far from the holy, for the bulk of my life I've never even remotely felt myself approaching sainthood and yet at the same time I've reached the conclusion that many pro-abortion folks are utterly heartless but it's not self-righteousness that spawns this evaluation as I've none of it to begin with. I think many pro-choicers are dark people and while I consider myself to be your rank-and-file sinner, I fully expect a lengthy stay in Purgatory at the least I don't want to take that final step over to the dark side (I hear BB cogitating a response) and the reader will note I was careful to use the word "many" here, didn't say "majority", "most" or "all" but candor compels me to admit for instance that many characters in the Terri Schiavo saga were downright creepy, I know a few liberals who feel the same way and again this is only a conclusion drawn from a sinner who is so far from the mark but draws the line at killing. As dear old Anonymous once noted "morality consists in drawing the line somewhere", you don't have to twist my arm if Beyonce and Britney, Eva Mendes and Jessica Alba are playing nude volleyball on the beach but I don't like to see dead fetuses in garbage pails. I guess the latter makes you a right-wing extremist, a fringe guy or gal these days at least according to polemical rules as defined by liberals who seem to feel that flexibility in one or more areas should guarantee your pro-choicedom. The other pejorative they'll frequently throw in my face is "Mr. Religious Fanatic" which for me is, as Mike Tyson would put it ludikwis since I've never gone out on a theological limb in any discussion or forum or blog with my latest calculations of who's in Hades these days, quite the opposite. Just an autobiographical note here SO GET IT STRAIGHT!!!

Life is like the bad job that never changes

A blog inspired by Beth's theme of late and as I said there sometimes I have to rejigger theology in my own head from time to time due to events. The late playwright Arthur Miller who as I recall was not known for being a religious person had this to say in his autobiography TimeBends: "Fuck you Death!" Probably for many of us we've come to accept death as natural and normal if not really a great thing, it's not and I think Miller tapped into something here basic to Christian thought without even knowing it and that is there is something fundamentally flawed with the Universe, in the original Christian understanding death did not enter the world until Man sinned and I covered alot of this ground already in my blog about why emotionally I can never be pro-choice (http://not-the-left.blogspot.com/2009/01/spiritual-view-on-pro-life-im-entitled.html) .

It's not an either/or situation, you can hold that God exists and yet Life is absurd and without meaning at the same time (although this is largely subjective since the happy and the unhappy cannot seem to relate to each other). The atheist "solution" besides ignoring Intelligent Design is too easy and doesn't address this central existential problem head on. Now whenever I've drifted towards this view people call you depressing, negative, pessimistic...relax, I'm merely stating a hard philosophical truth and do counsel people to get as much out of Life as you possibly can, you can and should enjoy Life to the max anyway but the answers religious folk give in such situations are too pat. So why do those of a spiritual bent continue to fool themselves insisting that God has plans for all of us which are too inscrutable for us to even figure out, always on some unknowing mystical plane? What about the 8 dead in the Taconic tragedy? I'd have thought a divine plan would not be so easy to foil.

The thought occured during my walk in Piermont this morning that maybe we're not meant to be here that long anyway and yet we cling to this life with all its absurdity and tragedy and yet maybe the good angels are whispering to us to just let it go. As soon as we're born we start to die, life's a bitch and then you die so why do we try to reconfigure a reality that isn't? Man sinned, we muffed it and can't seem to get back on track. Why are we here? Why were we born? I have no answer to that just know that it's not our true destination so if it's merely a sojourn does the duration really matter? IMO the real problem is secularism which teaches us to become too attached to this one life and meaning then becomes derived through materialistic means: career, house, money, sex etc. Final Thought - Your life here on Earth is very short, even the average lifespan of say 75 years is short when you stop to think about it so how the tragic affects us emotionally and spiritually is finite too and when the time comes when everyone looks back on this dot called Life, well as I said it really didn't make a whole lot of sense and we're in Heaven now so seen against the backdrop of Eternity its relevance is only temporary.

In the East life is cheap, in the West life is expendable

In the East: "Here's a pack of cigarettes, fix my car."
In the West: "Sorry, that cancer drug's not covered."

Maybe the government should fix your car too. Kind of missed Obama's speech last night, didn't know it was even on as no other president has spoken to the nation so often but caught some snippets on PBS after it was all over. With ObamaCare it has become almost impossible to not see Obama as a socialist or having socialist tendencies or at the very least belonging to some variant subspecies of the socialist genus (let me consult my field guide here). He's so convinced his vision is correct, a charge often leveled against us conservatives, his is an almost messianic mission. His rhetorical device of always painting the opposition to whatever he believes in, nay knows to be true as obstructionists to Progress, I know what he's doing the slick SOB. Obama has often been compared to Ronald Reagan but he's the opposite of Reagan in almost every way. He's killing us softly.

Justice as a value

Elie Wiesel, after his visit with Obama to the Buchenwald concentration camp, had this to say: "I think he (Obama) has a sense of humor but I'm not so sure he has a sense of justice yet." Early concepts of justice could be understood to be inside or outside the bounds of the law. Hamlet is rife with the most primitive and elemental concepts of justice and only in later years could you say that in Western civilization to find justice solely within the law is the only way to go, that vigilante justice is immoral. This blog takes that position as it is Mr. Wiesel's position but his comment is very very interesting, somewhat enigmatic regarding President Obama. What does he mean? what was he trying to say? it's pregnant with Meaning.

How many times are we counseled to just look the other way re various injustices, to let it go, is it really worth pursuing? and such, to be careful etc. Stephen Pagones pursuing a civil case against the Rev. Al Sharpton over the Tawany Brawley hoax apparently destroyed his marriage. He was the Assistant in the District Attorney's office up there in Dutchess County NY who was falsely accused with others of raping the young black girl Tawana Brawley in Wappingers Falls and Sharpton, the lawyers Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason led the charge. Some would say why did he pursue it so many years after the fact? everyone knows it was a big-time hoax, it embarrassed Cosby and the case is so old, so yesterday but I agree with him. In many cases to not pursue Justice, to listen to the pragmatic counselers of indifference, well it might be unfair to call it a kind of liberalism but it ain't conservative. Justice is right up there with freedom and personal responsibility and lower taxes and smaller government in the conservative View of the Universe. Even on a much smaller scale justice is important. As I blogged the other day about the misfortune that my cat met last Sunday morning, basically her skull was crushed in and she was left in a puddle of her own blood on the side of the road, that is also an issue of justice on a personal scale and I'm sure there are legions who would disagree. Inside the parameters of the law yes, of course but when you're a true conservative whether the issue is big or small you don't question for a moment the value of justice, any other way tends towards liberalism.

There is also the civil and criminal case against a group of Yonkers firefighters coming up. Basically it is alleged that a few of them would dose some of their fellow firefighters with acid or LSD and in one particularly vicious case while their victim began to hallucinate they screamed obscenities at the top of their lungs in his ears. It is also charged that they have harassed some of their victims for having decided to pursue the case against them. There is also the alleged coverup of the bloodwork by the City. These incidents all go back ten years at least but there has been a culture of corruption in City government for quite some time or so it's been said. Now again I'm sure there are many many people who would say why pursue such a case? it happened so long ago, the chemicals have long since passed everyone's brains and it's so dangerous to go up against a group of alleged psychos, don't you watch the movies? Ah yes but this is NOT the conservative position, not the true one anyway, and to not pursue justice in certain cases sets a very bad precedent indeed, it's defining deviancy down to quote the famous phrase from the late NY Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Justice is also cathartic, it serves a basic emotional human need for closure. Justice is so many things to so many people but I am bothered about Elie Wiesel's observation, have we lost a sense of justice in our culture? That liberals seem overly concerned with the rights of criminals and these days terrorists, there's more than a grain of truth to that. Their concerns are not unimportant but I too get the sense that Obama would rather just talk it out with the bad guys rather than do the right thing. To be taken to task by a noted Nobel Peace Prize winner however politely worded, that's a hell of alot of blogworthy material right there!

Obama's Notre Dame speech

Actually said something I agreed with which is unusual, said about abortion "in some sense the two sides are fundamentally irreconciliable." This was clever on his part, it had the subtle effect of making Obama look like a kind of disinterested observer of the issue, above it all looking at the debate from the outside, a professorial air being intellectually open to both sides despite his 100% rating from NARAL. Of course they all say they want to reduce the ole abortion rate and it's such a heart-wrenching decision for the woman. Of the second point I personally know of stories where the parties involved were unusually casual about it all and as to the first your average pro-choicer opposes such modest measures as informed-consent legislation so really it's just more pro-forma statements from a liberal president. Despite Clinton's safe, legal and rare it's not really about Choice at all but Abortion and the right to get one freely and without judgement from parents or other parties and to be fully subsidized by the American taxpayer if need be. Pro-forma statements are important though, it shows you have a heart and have properly wrestled with the issue even though your own views just accidentally, ever so coincidentally coincide with those of Kate Michaelman.

Cultural trends I don't get

Celebrity stalking

First off this isn't or shouldn't be a problem for us conservatives, rank-and-file conservatives view the average Hollywood celebrity as an airhead with left-wing leanings so where's the attraction? Then there's what I once called over at Hannityland our social caste system, no way Tyra Banks is gonna go out with some lonely drifter so why even go after someone totally outside of your own socio-economic orbit when you can bother the girl next door? So Brady Green, Tyra's stalker has been convicted at a non-jury trial and the judge would rather sentence him to psychiatric counseling rather than the 90 days in jail. I've talked about this before but you can't police somebody's head, you can only punish their actions. If I like Celebrity X or Z that's entirely between me myself and I, so long as my actions don't get out of bounds my mental domain is totally autonomous and no business of the Law. I am the sole judge and arbiter of my imaginative life, you cannot punish a person's thoughts and Hannity once said that's the real problem he has with hate-crime legislation, you're really in effect punishing a person's thoughts. So basically this judge sentencing Mr. Green to spend time with a shrink, first off it won't work nor should it, so some egghead is going to be able to dislodge IT? Only Mr. Green's actions should be the purview of the Law and as such he'd be better off getting the 90 days, as with Hannity's point there's the faintest whiff of fascism in the air say if Green is in some Barnes & Noble some day and wants to purchase a Tyra Banks calendar and the clerk calls security. It's Orwellian thought control and reading about these cases which for some quirk are becoming more common among the celebrity set a common thing is sending the woman flowers and gifts. Now you can debate the wisdom of this, Z doesn't think it's such a great idea in this day and age but by the same token it never struck me as a crime-crime, you know like bank robbery or embezzlement. If I were a cop I'd be like I didn't become a cop for this, it's basically Society making up laws as they go along. Celebrity stalking, it's weird for so many reasons and it's weirdly political but basically the mind cannot be put into a prison, punish people for what they do not what they think. If there's one rule at Stranded it's be not afraid, everything is bloggable and the day the cops come for your Cindy Crawford calendar it's over.

The fetal conundrum

People especially liberals often assume if you take the pro-life position that they can guess with a rather high degree of accuracy your position on other issues, some pro-choice whiners at Danny's place a few months back assumed quite naturally that I was for the war in Iraq but for me I take each issue as it comes. A theme has emerged at my blog of late and that is I don't apply social conservatism across the board. I'm on the record, on porn and prostitution I am very libertarian and with gay marriage I have no problem with the federalist approach although you'd have to put a gun to my head to attend the gay nuptials ("ok I'm getting dressed just let me find my tie"). BUT abortion is different my friends and that's because it's very very unique from the three big issues I just mentioned. Those have a personal element of distaste for so many by their very nature, my God just think Eliot Spitezer in nothing but his black socks but these issues generally do not involve the taking of an innocent human life (ok, generally speaking). For the average liberal though he glumps them all together into some kind of collective trauma of keeping the government out of our lives, actually out of our sexual lives because he does care very very much if you smoke or use an aerosol can. For the liberal with a conscience abortion is resolved this way: from a biological perspective he or she readily admits it's a human life, he's very personally against it as he's always fond of saying but because that human life resides for a time within a woman's body it ipso facto becomes a feminist issue, a women's rights issue not so much because of the nature of the fetus as he has pretty much figured this out by now but by the sit'chayshen. He or she can't get it out of his damn head that because the home of the fetus is the womb that the homeowner as property owner can do as she likes, it's nothing personal. She might see the fetus as an intruder although truth be told she answered the door when the penis rang. I'm a bad person because I only see the human life, I ain't sophisticated like Bill Moyers you know? I just know how to spit chickens.

Conservatives out of sorts

First off we have to put a checkmark in Obama's corner. He gave the order for the use of force last Friday to free Captain Richard Phillips from those Somali pirates. He gets a kudo or two in my book but somehow Jimmy Carter would've f****d it up.

The Winter of our Conservative Discontent - Beth has had it with liberals, you can't change their minds she says but before we go there we gotta look at our own camp. IMO the fiscal conservatives (FCs) want to take over the Party and purge us social conservatives (SCs) from the ranks. OK, maybe not soapie and Patrick M but the ones who pull the strings do. The FCs don't just want to stop moralizing about things like abortion, rather they want to moralize or mainstream abortion so as to talk about other more important things. Now as I blogged recently when you take the social issues off the table there is less and less that bonds us FCs and SCs together - economic policy, military campaigns and overall patriotism is basically what you're left with, kind of a thin gruel like eating the same thing everyday. Here's where the FCs are wrong though. I'm an idealist not just about politics but Life in general, even if our politics were correct Life could still suck. Put another way you need spirituality, conservatism has to be about moral values too. One of the SCs' focus is doing the right thing, the FCs would add nothing wrong with that but such right choices need to be freely made in an environment of maximum freedom. Whatever, we could have the right economic policies tomorrow, ultimate victory in Iraq and all the rest and still have the usual laundry list of social ills, divorce, abortion, drug abuse etc. In short how can you be a conservative and not talk about spirituality, about moral values? Social conservatism is about preserving traditions, not about saying psychedelics are good for you, that's libertarianism. So before I can respond to Beth's points we need to define what conservatism means, what does it really stand for? with so many strains of conservatism today it's hard at times to know exactly what it is we're fighting for and conversely before we take on liberalism we have to know what that stands for too, what precisely are they fighting for on their side?

& what if those cures never come?

I hadn't even planned on blogging about this today but Savage was so eloquent and insightful last night it inspired me. Yeah Savage is known for an extreme view every now and then (nobody ever seems to define this term "extreme") but I enjoy the show anyway and the biggie topic yesterday was Obama taking pen in hand (yet again) and signing an executive order lifting the ban on taxpayer funding of human embryonic stem-cell research. OK, so 'twas to be expected and so far Obama's report card has a big fat red L on top saying he's a liberal and so where to begin?

ALL the approaches from the scientific to the philosophical to the mathematical which I recently contributed in a blog point overwhelmingly in the direction that human life begins at conception. Faith talks about ensoulment but I don't think that's relevant here, after all if we hold a newborn may not get a soul until two weeks later we don't normally then sanction infanticide. You did not come from an embryo, you once were that embryo, so says this branch of philosophy concerned primarily with the nature of existence. Mathematically we have what Dr. Bernard Nathanson calls the vector of life at work, cells dividing at a rapid pace and forming organs etc., a velocity and direction at work, a force and magnitude and again the vector obviously begins at conception. It's a canard to say we don't know when life begins and will probably never know, that's not the issue anymore although many pretend it is but that's for psychology. The long and the short of it is as one pro-lifer put it after yesterday's signing "this president places very little value on the life of the unborn." You wonder though, yeah I know Obama's official political position is one of Pro-Choice but when he looks into the eyes of his daughters Sasha and Malia at night how can he not question his own stance or is he that hardboiled on the issue? Anti-socialism unites us conservatives far more than the social issues (ka-ching ka-ching) but for me the larger concern may be how extreme will Obama be on abortion? The media might pretend FOCA doesn't exist but I know an awful lot of folks who are concerned. As Savage said yesterday Obama is beginning to pay back one of his biggest constituencies, the abortion racket in this country. Some people might consider this out-of-the-box talk but I was never a fan of the box anyway.

I don't like being boxed in like this

Danny has a recurring theme over at Right Minds and that is his concern that the conservative movement not become irrational as the liberal movement has been in the past if I can give a capsule review here. He says the growing conservative charge that Obama is a socialist or has socialist leanings is evidence of the movement becoming unhinged. Libs did this with Bush and it became known as BDS or Bush Derangement Syndrome but here's another option: what if the libs were right about Bush and the conservatives are right about Obama? I was thinking about the late William F. Buckley Jr. the other day and one of his legacies was he almost single-handedly purged the John Birchites from the mainstream conservative movement. Now if you ask me if I agree with the Birchers I would say in large part NO but I still want to hear what they have to say just like I want to hear Rosie O'Donnell's theories on why steel can't melt. Throw it ALL into the mix and while Danny is a smart fella, imo he's a rising star but the reality of it is this whole country right now is the top of the blender having come off and the shake going all over the place. You hear this you hear that and pretty much you can't control it anymore, it is what it is and maybe that's a good thing after all. Savage said last night a very profound thing, when the day comes when you can't hear these things, when everyone says the same thing our country is gone, no longer a democracy. Gotta say something about those embryos in the next blog.....

The subject is ghosts

You can consider this a companion piece to my recent Why aren't there more miracles?, in short why aren't there more ghostly encounters? Having gone to a wake recently this thought's been rattling around the ole mental attic for a while but as it stands now the age-old question is there life after death is still quite up in the air. Now it's easy to make Casper jokes when this subject comes up but let's be a little serious here. The purpose of more visitations from our dearly departed would be twofold -- to ease the pain of the survivors and to add the weight of the evidence to that timeless question.

When I was a member in good standing at Hannityland I was mostly political but occasionally poked my nose around into other territory and I brought up the subject one day in the Religion Forum (please no dissing there, either respect any and all beliefs or consider yourself eternally banned). Monsieur Hben, the resident Protestant minister pounced on the topic and said consider any and all ghostly manifestations as the work of Satan but then two longtime and stalwart conservative Catholic posters chimed in too. Socrates and Apatriot agreed with Hben and pretty much said the same thing, that if your dearly departed Uncle Charlie walked through your living room one night to say hello that he's really a demonic imposter. Really?? I wasn't even aware the Church had such voluminous teachings on the matter, has Benedict given a recent statement? I'm aware of a few true-life ghost stories, some in the family and some I heard about involving friends and acquaintances. The tales are benign in nature and quite inspiring so Soc and Patriot's point would be what exactly, that some of these folks are actually in a rather bad place and the Devil is trying to hoodwink us?

I always liked that old TV series The Ghost and Mrs. Muir starring Edward Mulhare as the deceased sea captain and Hope Lange as the tenant of the house he's haunting. The ole Cap'n would appear constantly and converse with her and offer advice, take in and sympathize with her problems, he was a friendly spirit and took all the shock and dread out of death through his regular appearances, just a member of the family you could say. If only Real Life were this way instead of this eternal mystery, this perplexing and to many disturbing enigma that keeps us wondering and guessing right up 'til the bitter end, what's behind the curtain Monty? So anybody out there got any good ghost stories? I promise I won't tell Hben.

The incredibly obese

Here's the way I break it down. Now for the vast majority of us we won't go over a certain weight, most of us are probably overweight but within reasonable limits, a sensible paunch but it stops there and WHY you may ask? Has to do with one of the two strongest and most primal urges in human nature

EL SEXO,

the other being food of course. OK so now most of us enjoy both or at least hope to enjoy the fever of which Madonna sings about but the deal is we pretty much know that if it's too much going down the pike foodwise we ain't getting the other thing. Just trying to break things down here to their most elemental, most basic, most simplistic so the ones you occasionally see on Springer and in real life, those who are fat in an awesome way have pretty much made their decision in Life. They're going with the food and I can understand this. God gave you taste buds and as Gwyneth Paltrow said on one installment of Spain - On the Road Again "dieting is a horrible way to live" and I agree BUT...so at what crossroads point in your life's journey do you make the choice for food, that philosophical watershed of never going back to the other thing? Don't tell me it's metabolism because if you step out of the shower one night and you see you're 500 freakin' pounds you know you have to do something about it and do it now if you're ever gonna get that spoonful of lovin' going, the tub with the candles and the Barry White pumping in. It's all good though because it's all about choice, in this case FOOD VS. SEX, I just find it interesting is all.