"I teach the Bible"

So what? I know English teachers who teach English and don't know grammar. That you teach something is no recommendation. You have a Bible and you teach it to people. I'm not impressed. I have been in a number of churches wherein the minister had no clue what he was teaching, or he was teaching heresy. Like the Supreme Court Justice who thinks the Constitution is a "living document" and is thus ours to re-write at will, there are tons of "Biblical Scholars" who have made up little stories for themselves to believe about what the Bible really meant to say and are now in the process of teaching their narcissistic garbage to a parish full of suckers who will believe whatever they're taught, because they don't know any more about the Bible than your average schoolchild knows about Spelling or American History.

You're welcome to teach it all day if you want, but please don't use the fact that you teach it as proof that you know it or understand it.

The afterlife

Prager, we're pretty sure the afterlife is spent in an immaterial place. See "String Theory".

I happen to think it's another dimension in this universe, but that's just my opinion.

At any rate, the existence of an immaterial dimension or dimensions outside our three-dimension (three and a half, actually, since time really is a dimension but we're stuck in it, unable to move around at will) world means that there is no such thing as a heaven with pearly gates and no such thing as fire, since fire and pearl are both material things that do not exist in an immaterial dimension.

I wish you would mention how the ancient poetry we find in the Bible isn't meant to give lovely graphics about what you see, the road you walk down, the lion and the gazelle lying down together. It expresses moods, sensations, "What it's like to feel this way." Thus, the Beloved's breasts are like a clump of grapes, but no, they're not all lumpy and squishy and ready to be pressed into wine; instead the Lover's joy at burying his face between her breasts is as satisfying as admiring a fine clump of grapes. There's a huge difference.

So then is "heaven has streets of gold" is going to be an immaterial place as rich and lush as if we were walking through a marble shrine with the ground paved with gold. The eternal separation from God that some people have asked for is going to be as harsh and painful as if there were a fire burning inside, thus the image of a fiery hell.

"When people get something for nothing..."

"...it generally worsens their character."

Yah, I can testify to that. That's a good way for our government to keep people down: give them a pittance and tell them they're well off.

"Those who act unhappily all the time"

Prager, are you joking?

Okay, you're probably not. "Unhappily" is an adverb and describes how they're acting, right?

Wrong.

"To act" in this case is a copulative verb. Or, since the word "copulate" is a naughty one, you may have learned the term as "linking verb", which means that the subject and its predicate nominative are connected in a way that links them, so that you have a noun or pronoun before the verb and an adjective or adjectival noun after the copulative verb.

Thus, John acts smart. John is modified by the word smart, and we don't use an adverb "smartly" to modify the verb "acts". "John acts smartly" is just evil.

Don't get it yet? Consider this one: You seem intelligent. "Intelligent" modifies "you". Would you prefer, "You seem intelligently" ? Go to the rear of the class.

On a side note: When I was in school, a very boneheaded English Grammar text tried to tell us that "I feel well" was correct, rather than "I feel good." The committee of English teachers who wrote this book were wrong. Thanks to fifty years of not teaching grammar in "grammar school", they didn't understand that sentence well enough to parse the connecting verb and realize that "well" was totally inappropriate. They tried to slither around the issue by claiming that "in this instance, 'well' functions as an adjective," this admitting that an adjective was the appropriate choice. I feel sick, I feel happy, I feel inappropriate. Not I feel happily or inappropriately, those would describe what your hands were doing. (Shame on you!)

I remember there was a time when Prager used to say, "Boys and girls are born differently." The grossness of this error should be immediatlly obvious. You can be born in a certain way, but once you are born you have certain characteristics and don't confuse those characteristics with the manner in which you were born. Obviously someone told Prager how wrong this was, but I can't for the life of me figure out why he didn't retain the lesson and generalize it to other copulative verbs.

Prager question: "Did the advent of a child affect the quality of your marriage (your sex life)?"

"Love is not necessarily a feeling; it's a decision, too."

Amen. I've been trying to educate people on this for two decades. People don't listen.

Prager on vacation

I hate it when he's on vacation, because I tend to take the days off and not post anything, when I intended to keep listening and posting.

Oh, well, we'll see.

Zoos

Prager: After you've seen animals out in the wild, you'll never want to see them caged in a zoo again.

Well, that's nice, and I'm sure you're right, but sadly not all of us can afford to go see them in the wild. Many refuse to afford to go see them in the wild. Kids with such parents will never see them at all unless their schools drag them off on an annual zoo trip. I don't like the schools and I think they have plenty of money and they're not teaching what they ought to but I'm definitely in favor of expanding kids' horizons with a trip to the zoo.

Besides, if they never see them in the zoo, their only recourse is to see one of the charming "animal eats animal" shows on Animal Planet of NatGeo, and I say shows like those are basically garbage. Chase a wildebeest, pull the wildebeest to the ground, rip up the wildebeest. And we don't worry about teaching cruelty to animals this way? Why not?

"Nine dogs is a serious number"

The Queen of England has a flock of Corgis. Does that make her an eccentric? Or is she just a person who can have a lot of servants take care of so many dogs?

What do we do with Doris Day, who, if I remember correctly, had 23 dogs in her house? Is that eccentric enough for us to lock her up?

Putting a human face on toilet paper

Can it get any uglier or meaner or nastier?

By the way, Prager--Wherever you find someone profiting off insulting the other side, you'll find someone (often the same someone) using the same idea to profit off insulting the other side as well. So of course if there is Palin Paper (and I'd bet it came first), someone inevitably picked up the idea and brings us Pelosi Paper.

One voice you really can't mistake

Frank Sinatra. Of course his limpid singing style is like no one else's. So is the number of notes per measure the guy can sing flat.

Having such good pitch myself, I can't stand listening to him sing every third note sour the way he does. It kinda makes me ill.

What's more dangerous than being an enemy of America?

Answer: Being a friend of America.

Ask the people who fell from the helicopter skids as we fled from Saigon.

Margaret Thatcher was a prophetess

Margaret Thatcher gave a speech at Hillsdale in 1994.

Here is the Imprimus article.

"The older I get, the more I realize how much damage is done by the Left."

All their "good" intentions can be thrown in the same basket. "I love the poor, so I want you to give them money."

This isn't loving to the poor. It's infantilizing. I first realized this three decades ago when I had to think about how people, generally teenagers in this case, plan for their adult lives. You have to define your interests. You have to pick a career. You have to plan to stay in school, or if you're leaving school, you have to realize the consequences. If you want to do some kind of manual labor, you have to know that you'll be taking on a trade and probably going to trade school or apprenticing yourself to a tradesman or trade union or other similar group. You have to stay out of jail so they can hire you. Or maybe you plan to go into business for yourself, in which case you have to learn SOMETHING, even if it's just the art of raking leaves.

But if you want to learn nothing, you can goof off, play video games, spend all your time on the phone, go to the mall and chase boys, whatever. Then when you're 26 and off mommy and daddy's support, you can stick your hand out and demand the government support you.

So many of our people prefer the second option. Is that good for them? If you think living on a pittance, having no respect for yourself, and being a parasite instead of productive is good for you, then sure, it's good not just for them, it's good for our entire society and we should promote this lifestyle as much as we can.

Give yourself a gift for Christmas

Bought himself a gift, wrapped it, tagged it as "from ", his wife. Then he opened it on Christmas and oooo'd and aaaaah'd over "It's just what I wanted!" (black pyjamas with no pyjama-ey designs, fire trucks or basset hounds. (These sound very like a pair of pyjamas my father had back in the Fifties!)

I don't know how good a "sneak" this idea is. The wife knows what he did, the husband knows she knows, there is no constraint on her saying anything. If they leave it an open secret that's their problem; but the husband hasn't sneaked anything past her.

I wish I had given myself presents for Christmas. Too bad that with my upbringing it never occurred to me that that was possible. Dennis said it: You owe it to your CHILDREN to teach them to respect you. When they're little, you take them shopping for the other parent. If you're a single parent, you take them shopping for YOU, too. I wish he had said: if the other parent is a mean sonofabitch named Stephen Sakamoto, you'll have to take them shopping for YOU too. He didn't. I didn't think of it, and that turd taught the children that mom deserves nothing on Christmas. Only the dad and his parents deserve anything.

Nice, eh?

"My only problem is if the message is spelled incorrectly"

Prager, for fifty years solid, and for the fifty years before that when the teachers' unions were trying to shove it down our throats, children have been "learning" to read via the look-guess Whole Word method. It was a disaster. But because about 70% of students are eventually able to muddle through some text and read it out loud, the teachers love it. It was "experimental" in the beginning, which warms the cockles of teachers' hearts, then it was "modern" (even better), and it was always "progressive" which has always won immediate favor in the hearts and minds of lefties.

Of course, when we taught children to read the letters from left to right and decode the magnificent secret, one hundred percent of children learned to decode at age six or seven. And they could read a few thousand words their first year into instruction. With look-see whole word they are limited to exactly the number of words given by their shitty textbooks. And as most historians of reading instruction know, there was in the Forties and Fifties a war among publishers to see who could restrict the reading textbooks to teaching the fewest words. The winner taught first graders only two hundred sixty-five words.

What happens to the thirty percent who can't learn to read via the magnificent look-guess whole word method? They "develop" a mystery disease that has no cure--"dyslexia". Dyslexia is the worst thing that ever happened to our children (and is unknown in countries where they still teach reading one letter at a time), but it's the greatest thing that ever happened to the teaching profession, as twice as many jobs opened for the sake of teaching remedial reading to child victims of teaching malpractice.

Back to spelling. Kids who were taught to read by stabbing at the middle of the word and memorizing its shape become adults who can't spell. You need to play an online game that I play to see just how disastrous this whole word looksay garbage has been for the public.

The point is to shock

I'm not sure how long that's been around. A very long time, of course. But in the current vein. I know you can point to the hippies as the source of everything crappy in our society today. But sometimes they were just channeling crap from the previous decade, and sometimes the crap was even older than that. In the case of shocking us, this movement was amplified by our beatniks.

But rock was still just a loud annoyance with melodies, harmonies, and guitaristrations (as opposed to orchestrations) that we didn't like right up until 1970 when we saw a lot of bands arise that did nothing but shout at their audiences and smash their guitars. I had begun moving away from rock and into classical by then. I liked the subtlety of interweaving melodies from various parts of the orchestra (not really polyphony, just subtle contrasts like the gentle run of the violas against the rest of the strings) and by 1970 my frustration was extreme. I saw my age-peers as a load of intellectually dull people who had to be hit over the head with a sledge before their minds could alert to anything.

The Hayes Commission was dead. The new Movie of the Year was "Midnight Cowboy", as vapid and worthless a movie as has ever been made, but one of the main characters viciously attacks someone onscreen (I was never quite sure whether he had murdered the man), and the other scumbag dies a slow and crappy death, so it is emotionally draining and thus it must be a great, meaningful movie. Give it an Oscar. Women's roles had transformed from people of leadership, determined resolve, noble character and goodness, and an exemplary role model to "show us your tits, bitch". Cowboy movies died, now it's all sadistic gangsters torturing their victims and car crashes with gigantic kerosene-fueled explosions.

The pictoral arts, like painting, have completely lost the notion that we can just paint a scene with a tranquil river or farmhouse with cows. Yes, see? Can you hear the moaning and groaning of modern ignorami already? "Oh, give me a break, that's so effing boring, Kinkade and all that crap." Now art is someone announcing, "I have an idea! I'm going to..." and of course the idea has to be something shocking. Throw a crucifix in urine and take a photograph of it and you can get all the fools in town to pay money to see it. But ain't that enough of a majority in any town*? "I have an idea! I'm going to become famous for draping huge sheets of fabric across the land!" and he's made a fortune. At least his cloth doesn't explode, though.

Hit me over the head or I can't get it.


*From Huck Finn, where the two flim-flam artists are plotting to make money.

Today's gues: Bjorn Lomborg

"The Skeptical Environmentalist" author.

"Cool It" (movie)

Yes, there is global warming but our current silly solutions are not going to do it any good.

Sorry, Bjorn, but we are still coming out of the last ice age, which ended only 20,000 years ago, and there is going to be natural global warming for the next twenty thousand years.

The warmists: we have to get everyone on board, and we have to do much much more. Lomborg answers these arguments.

"I'm offended"

Prager: "I'm offended" is the new "shut up".

Yup. I'm still waiting to hear Mr. Prager use the term "trump card" though. So much of what leftists do during arguments is meant to force an instant victory. All the SIXHIRB slams are exactly that. "I'm offended" is meant to shut down conservative thought. We had such a label, when we started referring to leftists' controlling rhetoric as "politically correct", until the left themselves got hold of it and claimed it was meant to cut off leftwing and progressive speech. I knew intelligent people who actually thought that, completely unaware of the origins of that term.

The trump card is a name, label, title, accusation that is meant to eviscerate not just the opponent, but his argument and his friends, associates, mother, father, employers, you name it, as well. "You think that? You racist!" Now no one on the planet will ever be able to say that the guy may have a point, or even that he's possibly partially correct. Remember when a famous conservative said ONE THING about Hitler was praiseworthy? That Hitler had been decorated as a soldier in WW1, and this conservative, in the process of saying that there's no such thing as a purely good OR purely evil human being, acknowledged that EVEN Hitler had fought valorously for Germany during WW1, which immediately made him an Untouchable.

Gawd, I hate the left. That's why I left them.

Freud was a genius

Freud had some insights. Freud's theories started a whole branch of pseudo-science that enabled us all to understand the human being better.

Freud's theories were developed in the rarefied air of the nineteenth century German upper middle class. He never looked at the working class or the aristocracy or anyone from France or Nigeria or Japan or Ancient Sparta or the North Pole. He made declarations about all mankind that assumed his limited little pool of people represented the entire human condition. He was wrong.

When he drew his conclusions, he never tested them. People today can create tests that readily prove him ... Well, no, I can't say they disprove his theories, but they prove that he was not justified drawing many of the conclusions that he drew.

For the record, a similar arm-chair theorist is Piaget. I loathe this guy for the conclusions he drew from the tiny pool of children he supposedly "studied". He believed all human beings developed the same way, so after pronouncing that he only needed to watch his own two boys, he pretty much didn't look at other children and only drew his conclusions from the two he had in his den. He made other stupid assumptions: that intelligence never varies, that intellectual and conceptual growth is rigid and incontrovertible and follows a precise schedule which no other children would vary from.

He did "studies" that every psych student is taught, and his studies are taught as revealing the truth about intellectual development in children. Yet they were foolishly designed and he never tested them by varying the study in a way that could potentially give other results. Thus we are taught that the child can't coneive of the constancy of matter when a liquid is poured from a small measuring cup to a large one: the kid will happily answer the question "Which cup has more in it?" by pointing. Yet the ignorant and idiotic Piaget never took into account the unhappy fact that the child at this age is just figuring out that a truck is not always a truck, that not all cats are dogs, and that some books are really magazines. So when an adult asks him a question about which cup has "more" the kid trusts the damned adult to be asking a meaningful question, knows that inside his own heaar are words that have multiple definitions, tries to assign a definition to the question, and does something the adult considers cute but wrong. Some day, if the kid actually remembers the "test", he will realize the adult was lying to him and couldn't be trusted, but he hasn't figured that out yet.

So the adult doing the study then moves on to the length of sticks. He places a pair of sticks on the table in front of the poor confused baby. They are clearly the same length. The baby can even see that. Heckfire, the damned adult can even see that. Are the sticks the same length? The baby says yes. Then the baby moves one of the sticks forward and asks the baby which stick is longer, a leading question. The baby tries to assign meaning to the word "longer", since obviously the adult has failed to understand "longer" as a concept. Besides, the stupid adult is pointing to the distant end of the two sticks. The semi-verbal baby picks the stick that is sticking out farther at that end. The adult seems to be happy because he moves on.

What Piaget never tried to figure out was whether the same baby, if the adult pointed to the other end of the sticks, wouldn't choose the stick sticking out farther at the other end. And as it turns out, he does.

Piaget's theories are based on bullshit. Piaget was a fool. Freud's theories were not tested either. Freud may not have been a fool but he certainly was no researcher. Yet in the cases of both these men, whole bodies of knowledge are based on foolish theorizing from an armchair.

It has made me ill from the time I was in college. It made me sicker knowing that our entire education system is based on Piaget's bullshit.

What year will you decide to stop blaming mom and dad?

Well, I thought I had stopped blaming mom and dad in my mid-twenties. I did begin withholding comments like "I can thank my parents for teaching me that."

Only I haven't really quit. My counselor heard enough about how crappy my mom was to me to say, "She Gaslighted you." It was pretty helpful to realize that my mom, who seems to have been a regular bitch that only very strong people could stomach, belittled me constantly, and denied me the right to my own thoughts as well. She called me a liar all the time, even though it was my brother who did the lying. I could say "I like chocolate ice cream" and she'd come back with, "No you don't, you like strawberry"--often just a week after the opposite had occurred. I can't even trust my own perceptions any more, and I'm in my fifties. "That woman was putting me down, calling my ambitions 'your little hopes and dreams'," I'd say. And she'd come back immediately with, "That's ridiculous, she was being your friend."

My dad was almost worse. An opposite-sex parent who had no value for me, didn't much like me, and rejected me all around. The most time he ever spent with me was to scream at me for getting between him and the TV. His big dream for me was to see me in a white bathing suit and a golden brown tan, standing on the high dive, with all the fellows ogling me. He said so, about twice a year.

Do these things still bother me? Can they ever stop bothering me?

Do I let them limit me? Well, I realized that I'm terrified to tell people "no". Does that limit me? Of course it does. I'm afraid that if I'm honest with them, they will turn around and walk off and I will have no friends. So I'm a people-pleaser who can't please anyone. I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHEN I'M DOING IT. Does this affect me? I try not to let it. I try and I try.

I'm still trying, but I'm so sorry, I still don't have the skillz to stop people who are walking all over me. Last week I was in the grocery store, I wanted to buy a giant Washington Delicious Apple, and the other person took the apple out of the cart and put a bag of small red apples in the cart. I was even paying for them. I should have undone what she did, but I didn't have the courage.

What produces extraordinarily good people?

Start with some extraordinarily good parents, or advisors, or mentors. Very few of the good people create their extraordinarily good moral codes ex nihilo.

Next it helps to throw in a society that holds that essentially good behavior is based on similarly good principles. If your society promotes rotten behavior, if your society holds that it's really clever to cheat your neighbor or that the winner is the one who made off with the greatest amount of stuff, you're going to produce a lot of rotten apples with very very few extraordinarily good people.

Margaret Thatcher, a giant

If you listen to the BBC you'll learn that Thatcher was a monster. In the world of the decent and the indecent, the British plant her firmly among the Hitlers of the world.

Was she "classy"? You can't use that word in a country that really does have classes. I believe she's Dame Margaret now, which is much deserved, but I don't think the title is enough to lift her out of the merchant [upper] middle class. It would be delicious if she were actually raised to the peerage. How about Duchess Thatcher? bwahaha. Such a wondrous thing that would be, Margaret Thatcher in the House of Lords, a new creation but an intelligent woman, solid leader, educated and informed, able to speak wisely on just about any policy. Tell it to the Lords! Or maybe she would be better left to the Commons.

Just some random thoughts. One can dream.

We punish third world countries with our nutty energy policy

There is no punishment against The Left for their murderous energy policy.

Yes, we can thank the Left for their asinine policy against DDT. The history of that movement is absolutely appalling.

Carbon dioxide is now pollution.

Orwell would have said, "I give up." I doubt that, he was a bit of a nut himself.

If you produce carbon dioxide you're a polluter. Prager: "What if that's phony?" What if? We know it's phony, it's from The Left and it violates the "common sense" law.

Three thousand pages of regulations in California.

Prager, I'm really uncomfortable with your using the word "Utopian" in an attempt to characterize the silliness of our leftists. Not because it's inaccurate but because as a label that could discredit the people who deserve to wear it, it's a flop. We in the Sixties made "Utopian" a word of praise, a one-syllable panegyric. It still bears the aura of "goodness" because we have yet to make the cast that a Utopian is a fool and can be (usually is) very destructive when they enact and enforce laws and policies that are meant to bring about Utopia.

You need to find a more sinister term.

Miracle drug banned

Yeah, if aspirin had been invented today instead of a hundred years ago, it would never get the approval of the FDA. It is associated with some birth defects in rats. Yet it has never been shown to cause birth defects in humans. Nonetheless, it would never get that far in testing.

How sad. How many billions of headaches has aspirin cured in its career?

Yes, I know about Tylenol. Some people don't respond to it as well as they do aspirin. Most, in fact, I think. Also, aspirin brings down fevers much better than Tylenol does.

Unlike Tylenol, aspirin keeps down your inflammatory proteins when you feel yourself coming down with a cold, so you can escape the feeling that you have been run over by a truck.

Think how much misery aspirin has averted, that it never could have prevented if the FDA had been around a hundred years ago.

Beside the Golden Door

Beside the Golden Door

Just a couple of notes as the authors talk about their book:

This is a book recently published by the American Enterprise Institute.

Book about immigration reform, small, pithy, and highly recommended by Prager.

1965 - the beginning of "Chain migration", wherein not just children and spouses were automatically allowed to immigrate, but now it's parents and siblings.

Illegal immigration is a consequence of bad legal immigration policy.

11 million illegal immigrants, 8 million of them are working.

Sorry, I got taken afk for a while, and missed the rest of the interview. They had just begun discussing the economic benefits and burdens that illegal immigrants put on our system.

The only refugees the world cares about ...

The world?

The world is full of a multitude of people with a multitude of different ideas.

But for some reason when the news people want a public opinion they can air, they always go to the leftists to get the "real" opinion.

Thus we are told, "The world hates America" when the truth is that in ports all around the world, small business people selling their wares in the market just looooooove seeing Americans when we come up the row with our dollars and our willingness to part with them. When some Panamanians were demonstrating for independence in the Seventies, we were told that "Panamanians want independence"-- but anyone who had spent more than one second watching the footage would have realized that there were no more than three hundred people (who all looked like students) waving their fists and signs at the embassy.

When a court rlues against one of the underpinnings of Roe vs Wade, Molly Yard pounds the table and rages "The women of America will not stand for this," but the opinion of Beverly LaHaye, president of an organization with four times the paid members that NOW can claim, is completely ignored.

We are also told that "Europeans are all against the death penalty" when the truth is that a poll showed that the populace is evenly divided on the issue.

Sorry but "the world" is not "the outspoken, liberal half of the world".

Fracking is safe, but ...

... but that doesn't stop New York's powerful Green lobby.

Prager: "They live for some pristine vision of reality..."

Well, Prager, that's true, they have a pristine vision of reality. I think it goes deeper than that. To them, "pristine world" excludes human beings wherever possible. Human beings aren't part of nature. Human beings are rotten plunderers who destroy everything they can. Human beings are never seen as preservers of the planet or protectors of nature. Planet earth would be better off with NO human beings trashing it up.

I think this attitude was what enabled so many castrophists to leap on the band wagon with cries of "human beings are about to destroy the planet." It took no conversion for them to feel this way.

Processeeeez

Oh, good God, Prager.

The singular is "process". This in no way is related to the word "basis" that everyone pluralizes with "bases".

The plural of "process" is "processuhz" and not "processeeeez". You are trying again to sound airieyoodite, but getting it wrong is by definition never airuhdite.

Where is the Global Warming?

Prager is committing the same sad error that the AGW advocates committed for twenty years: he is talking in terms of lifetimes, centuries, this winter, last summer, or ever since they started keeping records.

These will not wash.

The planet's temperature goes up and down. A chart of historic temperatures looks just like the DJIA. The tracking needle shakes and pulses and gives us a massively jaggedy line. Sometimes the line bulges upward for a hundred thousand years, then it bulges downward for thirty thousand years. We have Ice Ages, not ice seasons. And that has been Mr. Gore's stupidity. He spent twenty years frightening people over "the warmest year on record", completely ignorant of the fact that the earth couldn't care less about a hundred years. A hundred years means nothing; the earth warms and cools by a couple of degrees now and then anyway. A thousand years wouldn't mean anything; maybe a hundred thousand years would be meaningful, but only if another half million years were to go by and the temperature hadn't changed to another level by then.

Bragging about "this was such a mild summer" gives the "latest five years" baloney credence. That is for children.

Basically good

People can be basically good when they take "good" to mean "doing right" and also want to feel that they're a person who "does right". Thus, as was put forth in How To Win Friends and Influence People, even the worst of mass murderers will reward themselves with the feeling that "I'm good" simply by redefining what they do.

Without God there is not only no restriction as to what you can call "good" but there is no control over assigning themselves all the "good" feelings that go with "doing good." Even Al Capone claimed he was good with "All I did was give people a good time."

mmhmm.d

The strength part has been truly undermined in men

So, indeed, has the integrity part.

That's why some of us see current trends as a "war on masculinity".

Men need to be strong, except for those rare fellows who want a woman who will tell them what to do, what to feel, and what to think. I feel sorry for such men, and I am disgusted by the women who dominate them.

What men and women want most in a relationship

Just some notes on what Prager said today. Words in italics are my observations.

Men want to be admired.
Women want a man they can admire.

Women want to be cherished.
Men want a woman they can cherish and protect and make her feel safe.

Integrity and strength.
Strength without integrity is machismo.
Integrity without strength is a nice milquetoast.

Men can be deceived by beauty.
Women can be deceived by strength.

The strength + integrity thing is not a very common combo.

You've left out: how does a woman generate that cherishing in her man? They don't come by it alone and without effort. I always seem to kill it off by giving him way more than he wants to be given. What I've seen in other women is a readiness to demand. Demand love, demand service, demand that he put himself second always. The movie "How to Lose a Man in Ten Days" was as true a story as any supposedly factual movie. Push him around, tell him what to do, be inconvenient, make him put out great service, and he'll be enslaved forever.

Still, I would like to know how they dare to practice of taking till he drops from the self-sacrifice. I give and give and give in an effort to get them to think me worthy of being given back to. Instead I earn their contempt. Meanwhile, these women just take and take and take and their men think they're the most wonderful things on earth.

It is very un-sexy for a man to just sit on the couch. Boy, isn't that the case. That's what my husband did, while his dad was constantly at work around his house. The wife, my mother-in-law, had something she could admire. At the same time, he could be proud of his beautiful, well-kept, eighty year old house, while my husband's forty-year-old house was falling into decay like a hillbilly's cabin. He wouldn't even let me hire people to fix the house, though he earned $86k per year. I had no respect for him.

G.K. Chesterton quote

The quote is "When people stop believing in God the problem is not that they believe in nothing, it is that they'll believe in anything."

I found the source for this quote near the bottom of the Wikiquote page for G.K. Chesterton, under the header, "Misattributed".

Wikiquote Chesterton page

They say:

When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.

* This quotation actually comes from page 211 of Emile Cammaerts' book The Laughing Prophets (1937) in which he quotes Chesterton as having Father Brown say, in "The Oracle of the Dog" (1923): "It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense." Cammaerts then interposes his own analysis between further quotes from Father Brown: "'It's drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it's coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition.' The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything: 'And a dog is an omen and a cat is a mystery.'" Note that the remark about believing in anything is outside the quotation marks — it is Cammaerts. The American Chesterton Society has explained the origin of the phrase.

See the Chesterton Society's explanation of this.

Mankind cannot change the temperature

I sat with my fellowship group from my church, trying to teach them that there was order to the Bible, which they had never noticed, in spite of the fact they were all in their sixties or older, had all been cradle Episcopalians, had been read a lesson a week their entire lives, and knew many many phrases from the Bible from having heard them again and again in Sunday services.

Came an allusion to the walls of Jericho.

"Those didn't really fall down," they insisted, "it was an earthquake that did it."

I have heard this claim before. "The Bible isn't a chronicle of miracles performed by God on behalf of a silly little tribe of nomad shepherds and warriors. The real miracle was in the timing of the events, like earthquakes, volcanoes [claimed as the cause of the Exodus miracles and the parting of the Red or Reed Sea], raising the dead [swooning profoundly], and so forth."

So, I asked them, you're saying God didn't act and shake those walls down? He made an earthquake happen?

They assented. God was sitting up on a cloud looking at human events and JUST as the Hebrews were marching around the city of Jericho, blowing their silly little trumpets, he chose to make an earthquake happen such that the walls, and just the walls, of the city fell down.

Apparently earthquakes are able to be selective in what they destroy.

Apparently, though, these charming and otherwise intelligent women were so used to the idea of an earthquake happening, and it not being miraculous, that they could accept such a thing without batting an eye.

I pondered this. I know a little about earthquakes. I believe these women did, too. Picture it: deep in the crust of the earth, a gigantic slab of rock is pushing against another gigantic slab of rock. Each of these slabs is being pressed by hundreds of miles of rock under pressure, pressed against the other slab. It's been pressing for millions of years at the very minimum, and every now and then it gives a little slip; sometimes it gives a huge slip and one slab jumps twenty feet to the side. Either way, the earth itself has been doing this pushing, and the energy released is gigantic. This is easy to understand, especially if you've never thought very deeply about it. This is as far as most people have thought, and it ends there. To be honest, I've only thought a tad beyond this myself.

But here it goes. The earth is moving the slabs or plates. Over the thousand years between massive earthquakes it builds up a nearly inconceivable amount of pressure. No, actually, it is quite inconceivable for the human mind, so gigantic is the energy that is stored in a fault line. Though it is measurable and can be described with numbers, our brains cannot conceive how huge it is, or as common parlance puts it, we "can't wrap our minds around it." I know it's inconceivable because these women couldn't conceive of it.

But note, this is why we like naturalistic explanations. We're used to them. We don't boggle at an earthquake, or at a fierce wind, or a flood. We've seen them all, they just happen, and they happen all the time.

But I had to ask these women, how much energy does it take to push five miles of rocky continental shelf to make an earthquake happen? And how much energy would it take to push down some man-made little structure like the walls surrounding Jericho? Which would be easier for a god to do? Why go for the unbelievably huge act of creating an earthquake and ignore the relatively puny little chore of knocking down some walls? Even big, thick walls (from the human perspective) like those surrounding Jericho.

I doubt I ever convinced those women of the enormousness of effort in a natural phenomenon. At a different time I tried to show them how much energy was in a wind. Just a normal, 10-mph wind. You feel the wind where you're standing in it and it's blowing your face. You see it moving the branches of a tree over here, and kicking up some dust over there. But do you realize how wide that wind is? You could drive hundreds of miles horizontally before you drove out of it. And you could rise a few thousand feet before you flew into another layer of weather that was doing something else. That's just one wind, just one phenomenon.

Could the US government create a wind? With all the machines we've ever invented and used, we couldn't make one wind, not one apparent event that even remotely imitated what sunshine routinely does every single day.

But our puny little imaginations cannot grasp that. All our clever inventions can't create it. But when an idiot like Al Gore steps up and starts screaming about human beings heating up the entire atmosphere--all 54,903,832,473,600,000,000 cubic feet of it, and that's just counting the ten thousand feet nearest the surface--most people have no clue about the magnitude of such a feat (that it's humanly impossible except in wild imaginations) and instead respond to their inner Chicken Little and become rescuers. Thus, the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) fantasy found a ready audience in a majority of Americans, partly because of peer pressure (from Earth in the Balance: there are many good people who should know better) but primarily because they were too poorly educated to challenge the notion and too reluctant to stand up to the many who were busy tarring all the doubters.

The spectacular lie...

...that millions of Americans die every year from second-hand smoke.

Wouldn't it be nice if Americans had a high-pressure anti- campaign like the one against smoking! Think how many people we could pressure out of smoking marijuana, or snorting coke, or whatever the current pop fad drug is. Or alcohol; why is there no high-pressure campaign against boozing? or drunk driving?

What if we had a high-pressure campaign FOR good behaviors? Like, getting married before the baby is born. Keeping your promises. Dealing honestly with others.

What if every kid in every elementary school had been programmed to turn on bullies and pressure them against their bullying? What if every child pressured every other child to behave in class, instead of how they treat them now, which is to support them and applaud them for disrupting the lesson?

What if we could high-pressure teachers into learning how to teach? Into dumping the garbage they had learnt in Teacher's College and using their good sense to see teaching not through Piaget and Dewey's eyes but through Marva Collins's eyes?

Liberals are children

"Liberals are children; they don't want to control themselves or regulate their own behavior."

This is what I have observed. This is one reason I left the left wing. And one reason I don't argue with them any more.

They argue like children. They start on the assumption that any attack against their opponent will defeat his position and win the argument for them. That's why you hear all the name-calling, but you'll also hear any line they like that is meant to gut their opponent's right to speak with them. "You work for big oil," "your mother wears army shoes" and "you're a racist" are the first attacks to come out. "Your premises are faulty because..." is rarely if ever heard.

"If you want to be vice president, you don't wink into the camera."

Isn't it ironic that the party who loathe Sarah Palin for her putative "stupidity" don't have the slightest problem with Al Gore, one of the biggest fools ever to hit the political scene?

Shaving in the car

Prager tells us he shaves in the car, because it's so convenient.

Isn't this a rather bad distraction? Maybe he only shaves on the freeway but I don't think that makes it okay. I assume he's smart enough not to look in the rear view mirror to see what's going on. Nonetheless, it's a distraction. The brain focuses on the neck, even while the eyes are supposedly focused on the road. But the eyes are not fully doing their job.

Prager needs to see that study that tracked people's eye movements while driving while distracted. He doesn't understand that the eye movements need to roam across the visual screen, picking up children who are playing beside the street, catching the occasional car approaching the intersection from the side, watching for that green light to go yellow before we get to that intersection, watching for that car just ahead and to the left which might be beginning to change lanes, and so on. The brain that is occupied with any activity in the car, such as smoking and shaving, is less alert to these other things.

Take the two minutes to shave before you leave the house, Prager.

Thank you.

Electric shaver

Prager: "At 13,000 rotations... Electric razors ... I often shave on the air

I find it hard to believe that a man who gets dresssed in a suit and puts on a tie for his radio show actually stoops to shaving in the studio, even if the mic is off. That is the height of being casual. Or maybe that's why I imagine you more often in a nice cardigan sweater than in a suit jacket.

The best of the best in relationships

Much as a man wants to be admired, she does indeed need something to admire.

But yes, as Prager stumbled upon, he has to present something admirable to her

He works to be admirable, works to give her the best man he can give her.

"This is the best of all possible situations; he works to be admirable, and she admires."

Some of us should be so lucky.

For the record, I have always striven to appreciate my guys. In all my relationships, I have given so much they held my gifts in contempt. I asked nothing in return. This does not mean I thought I deserved nothing in return, but it means that I demanded nothing, and so I got nothing but contempt and ill treatment. Why do people act that way?

What a man wants first and foremost from his relationship is to be held in high esteem.

I do believe this is as true as the law of gravity.

My marriage seemed to go bad when he started turning his back on me every night when I tried to come on to him. I was stroking and petting and admiring him both verbally as well as physically, and he'd roll away from me and turn his back on me. No, he was not inviting me to rub his back; as a matter of fact, he had said he actively "unwanted" any back rubs.

So I gave up. "I give up," I remember saying to myself. "I'm hurt by all these rejections; if he wants sex, he can come to me."

He only remembers that I didn't come on to him.

Go figure.

Youse kids

Do you not see, "youse" is an attempt (by a group--I'm not accusing any individuals of any neologisms) to make a plural of that idiotic dual word, "you", which is both singular and plural but like "Sie" in German does not distinguish in verb agreement, taking the third person plural form for both singular and plural and making a distinction between the two impossible except in context.

This is a very logical adaptation. Any form that shows a plural of "you" gets my stamp of approval. "Youse" (as if it were one you, two yous) is fine, though it bears the disgraceful stain of having come from some very working-class people. *gasp* Y'all works, though that has been disgraced by coming from Southern (America) origins. There is "y'uns" (you ones, i.e. you (plural) individuals, and not incorrect in the making a plural of "one", so shut up Spellcheck), there is "ye" (hard to say, but who cares).

Suggest more.

Who needs marriage ?!

At last someone else has said it.

From the Sixties on, "marriage" has been a dirty word. Who needs it? Real men don't get married, right? They remain studly and have as much sexual variety as possible.

Real women don't get married, said the feminists. A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. Then came the bumper sticker that told us how much the driver of that car was loving her bachelor life, as if she were superior to us sheep who were so dumb as to practice conventional life and get married.

We don't need a piece of paper, or some stupid religious person with a goofy collar, to tell the world we love each other. We can practice commitment without it. We're not stupid. We don't need to have the state recognize us as an entity, blah blah blah.

The idea of marriage as a social institution was completely beyond their grasp. It got turned into a worthless patriarchal institution meant to keep both parties, but most intensely, the woman, into slaves to some traditional form of social imprisonment.

Along came the gay lobby. "We don't want anything but for people to stop persecuting us," at first, then it became, "We want both lifestyles taught in the schools" and then it was, "We want to change the definition of marriage to include anyone we damn well please."

Gradualism, folks. Gradualism.

"Anybody with ears would say, "Tchaikowsky"

Speak for yourself, thanks. I really really don't like Chaykovskii.

I do like the nationalists, particularly Borodin, Mussorgskii, and my favorite, Rimskii-Korsakov.

And I pride myself on having a better ear than you have.

"I'm thinking of this terrific woman, who never got married."

Prager: "There are many ways to lead a happy life."

I hate being alone. When I see something that interests me, or excites me, or gives me a happy little thrill, I want to share it with someone else. Sharing it makes it twice as fun or twice as interesting, or twice as fulfilling.

On the other hand, I can see something I love, or that sends a thrill of pleasure through me, or makes me happy for a time, and if I have to keep it to myself, my day is spoilt.

By the way, I'm an excellent woman, also.

I devoted my youth to the reading of the classics, in defiance of the standard American school curriculum. By the time I was 13 I had read more of classical literature than most people read in their lifetimes, which isn't saying much. I found a book in my mother's library, "Good Reading", went through it, made a list on a steno pad, and began checking off the titles as I read the books. I didn't always understand the books. I didn't get out of them everything that a college literature major would have got out of them. But reading them at age 12 and 15 meant that I had a much better basis for understanding what I read when I was 16 and 18.

I knew a lot about history. In 8th grade my private school began its curriculum on World History and we started with a giant, thorough volume on Ancient History. Then we moved and I missed Medieval/Renaissance history and Modern history. I did well in my American history and government classes, but I wish heartily that they had been more thorough, especially the American government class, which was taught by a liberal who thought the Constitution was meant to be "a living document" and should change at the whim of judges.

So I read a lot. I understand people and institutions better than my peers. My peers came half a generation after the hippies. We were a little late to be out on the campus green getting shot for our opposition to the Viet Nam war. Instead we were growing herbs, drinking green tea or sake, and fighting to ban aerosols. We made a lot of fuss about ending racism while we fought to patronize minorities to death, confident in the assumption that they didn't have the intelligence, skills, or resources to succeed on their own without a white liberal to rescue them.

I learned to diagram sentences and I learned to love grammar. It helped me to understand what I was doing when I was writing. Science was interesting but science classes weren't; I avoided them, and at the advanced age of 20 started learning more about science from my new husband's college textbooks. I took some classes in science. I loved math but only to the point where it required me to apply myself to "a page a day". I never got all the way through my programmed text in geometry, bought from my private school's textbook supplier, because I always seemed to have other things I needed to do more. But while I was working on it, prior to going into 9th grade, I loved it. Geometric proofs--another kind of game, fun as heck, not far from crossword puzzles and diagramming sentences.

Apart from books, there is art. I love art. Got to take two courses out of a series of five on the history of Western art: 1. Ancient and 2. Baroque. I wish I had been able to take Renaissance, Medieval, and *gag* Modern. The modern art covered Romantic, Impressionist, and Twentieth Century art. I have found I'm not all that wild about the Twentieth Century. Much of the art, music, and literature of that era doesn't appeal to me. The history is much more interesting, but I was put off by the face presented by such monstrosities as "modern" [classical] music, cubist and abstract art, and so-called "modern" literature. People who think Sylvia Plath is "deep" should be boiled in pudding with a stake of holly through their hearts.

I love museums. I would love museums in old houses if ever I had had a chance to go to any. I love old houses because seeing their interiors makes me feel all warm and cozy inside. I'm not among that bunch of hateful people who think that any era that came before theirs was to be despised. Those people have never read a book and instead derived their sense of intellectual importance by joining the "sneer at everything else" party the beatnik and hippie generations so thoroughly cultivated. Both those generations were very, very badly educated, and knew almost nothing of other times or other places, which made them susceptible to any kind of suasion that was tried on them. Communism was represented as the intellectual movement, the good movement, the movement for people who cared about other people. They leaped in with both feet. Capitalism, because driven by self-interest, was become the evil force in the world, something only devils and demons would advocate. It's a shame that understanding the two systems actually required some thought and introspection. It was much easier just to proclaim oneself and one's ideas superior to everyone and everything else.

I love nature. I had binoculars always with me because I just had to look at trees, flowers, and chirping birds as often as I saw something new. When I was a mother of scouts, I volunteered for the troop and went with them to several campouts. No more, for those little joys have been stripped form me. I would go again if I had the opportunity. What I don't love is watching documentaries of nature on the TV. A lion kills a gazelle. A cheetah kills a water buffalo calf in the process of being born. Two rams fight it out, and bull seals shove each other off a rock. HO HUM.

I used to like physical exertion. Skiing, tennis, sailing, hiking, swimming--I was very good at all those. I used to teach sailing, and consider myself to be among the best sailing teachers in the world. I'll link to my ebook about teaching sailing as soon as I finish writing it.

Most of what I'm telling about are activities of the mind. I don't consider them to be worth much without a good heart. Not to denigrate them, mind you, because they're so important to me, but that's because I dislike the notion of a mind, even a weak mind, going to waste, and I think every person on the planet should strive to put thoughts into their head and then should exercise their brain pondering on those thoughts. It is not enough to spend all your time watching "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" and "The Next Top Model". Those shows are for idiots who really wish to AVOID thinking or using their brains. Documentaries about history, science, and combing through rubbish for the rare antique that can be cashed in for a large profit are briefly interesting but should never make up the viewer's main intellectual fare.
Constantly sending "I love you" messages over MSN to your vapid little sweetheart on the other end of the line is fine, but have you ever said anything ELSE to her? Of course you'll argue that you have, but all she has ever offered to the conversation is what a pig her mother is, a jackass her stepfather is, what mean-spirited bitches her sisters are. I guess you need a "victim" to rescue and make you feel important, but trust me, she needs to shut up and go read a book instead of shouting about how desperate she is to have you inside her. By the way, have you never observed how the back half of her empty head is missing? It's flat, indicative that there's nothing holding the skull up. No ideas, no deep thoughts, not even any shallow thoughts, unless you consider the latest "fad teenage girl series" to be a "thought". She's a ditz.

My heart is a different matter. I love everyone. I care about people I barely know. I care about people I don't even know. That's why I took on the job of chairing The Hunger Committee at the church I used to belong to, why I volunteered so much time, not just at church but for the Boy Scouts I give and give and give to people, never expecting anything in return (and that's usually just about how much comes back).

Oh, well, enough. I'm a terrific woman, too, and I did get married, but I always seem to marry bad men. They see a giver and it brings out the taker, take take take and never give anything back. Story of my life.

Oh, well, it's "the best" of Prager

So much for worrying about posting today.

I'm going to work on my "The Perfect Sailing Instructor" ebook.

I'm about half done with the rough draft.

Been on break

Sorry, though it's not as if anyone missed me.

But I'm back now.

Sarah Palin's Alaska
The Learning Channel
Sunday, 9PM Eastern

Prager: Why do they always give Eastern and Central, and never Mountain or Pacific?

Very easy answer, which I've gotten from actually reading the screen, and drawing a few conclusions from the knowledge that lives in my fantastic brain. Programs are rebroadcast for the Pacific zone, so all the PST people have to do is read the number given first to see what time to watch.

Central is given because there are so many people in that zone. Giving central time as one hour behind eastern tells the watcher that the network didn't schedule a different time for the next time zone as well.

Mountain is not given because there aren't a lot of people in the mountain time zone, and those who are there enjoy a superior intelligence which allows them to add the number 1 to the time given for "Central".

Concluding with Pacific, the networks assumed, mostly correctly, that the pacific people would be ablet to read the leading number, which also applies to themselves.

Easy.

Music: "What can engender that many endorphins in that short a time?"

Prager loves that little jazz piece he place for us, in which a pianist hits the same two keys over and over and over ...

Sorry, Prager, it doesn't even "send me". I like jazz, but I'd rather the jazz were from the Twenties or Thirties or even the Forties.

The power of music over our moods

Prager: "There is nothing that can change your mood so quickly as music."

Fifteen years ago my kids introduced me to the more modern forms of rock, especially Alternative. I hadn't listened much to rock since Three Dog Night destroyed it around 1970, and Janice Joplin and Jim Morrison died soon after that. Besides, I had formed a passion for classical music around 1968 and really didn't want to listen to rock any longer. It's a "competitive" genre ("I'm a better person than you because I know more about music (read: this kind of music) than you do.") and I was sick to death of having to recount to people just how many concerts I had been to or how many albums I owned. There was always someone who had more than I did.

Alternative, you may or may not know, is a form of rock that is a little more musical and a little kinder on the ears than the other forms. Other "gentle" genres would be techno and trance. I listen to most kinds of rock (the exception being anything with screaming for vocals) but almost always enjoy Alternative. I know, I'm not as good as you because I even admit to liking it, but so be it.

After a while listening to this genre, I realized something was bothering me. Almost every song sounded as if the singer and his band were trying to tell us he had a hole in his soul, that something very serious or very deep or very large was missing in his life, some great hole was eating up his heart. Every song had this characteristic. Whether he was singing about his lost love or an opportunity he had never seen or taken advantage of, his heart ached.

Country is infamous for this kind of lyric, and yet country never makes me sad the way alternative does. He's sad over his lost love, sure, but it doesn't seem to be reflected in this existential "hole in my soul" kind of aching and yearning to be whole again.

So I've been wondering: does anyone think that there might be a relation between the saddening, aching, longing, yearning, what's-wrong-with-my-life music that so many youth listen to, and the fact that so many kids commit suicide?

"Trophies for losing ... and then pay for it"

No, you're wrong, the kid didn't have to pay for his trophy. The parents were supposed to do that honor.

There might have been some point to it if the kid had had to pay for it, in maybe letting him earn SOMETHING to do with this phony trophy. But the parents were supposed to do it behind his back. Huge difference.

"They tried to protect him from pain"

Actually, no, they tried to pretend there was no pain. "How could those other kids be making fun of your ears when your ears aren't big?" Essentially they were Gaslighting their son. "Your perceptions and those of the other kids are completely against reality: your ears aren't big."

Your recommendation is just as bad. "So what if you have big ears, those kids have no business making fun of them because they could have made fun of so much else, like Bobby's big nose and Susie's lazy eye."

In other words: "You shouldn't feel hurt by these kids. You need to learn to not feel that way."

I have a suggestion. How about the parents acknowledge the child's hurt? "Oh, honey, it's so awful to have some kids picking on you. That must feel so terrible."

My parents, like young David's parents, denied that there was any pain, denied that anyone could possibly be picking on me, denied that being picked on could hurt or that it mattered if it did. None of this denial helped me deal with it in the slightest. What I needed to know was that I was a precious and valuable human being--the opposite of the message that my bullies were giving me, that I was worthless scum whose only purpose in life was to be kicked and spat upon by the worthy and important kids.

To be told I was scum needed to be contradicted by my parents, as well. That they denied everything that was happening to me, right down to my hurt feelings, did nothing to help me, but left me adrift in an ocean of hurt with no life preserver.

There are probably those who would say that Prager did acknowledge his son's pain, because they see an implied message, "[Sure it hurts but] so what?" and I would love to know how that worked for others as well. I can't see it, myself, but I'm willing to learn.

Jesse Jackson? Seriously?

Jesse Jackson complains about the plight of black people all the time. Why? Has he ever done anything to alleviate the situation? I don't mean "he started the Rainbow Coalition." That's a rotten answer because the Rainbow Coalition has never done anything more important than to teach preschoolers to recite the mantra, "I'm black and I'm beautiful." Well, that's nice, black IS beautiful but being black doesn't make you beautiful, and teaching kids that they're beautiful no matter what they do is the kind of moral teaching that resulted in so many of them going to jail in the first place. Then once "too many" of them were in jail, more race-baiting from Jackson convinced the majority of an entire population that dark-skinned people were only in jail because of the color of their skin, not because what they did to other people--the majority of them black--was heinous and evil.

Obviously I have no love for Jackson. I think what he has done at various times in his life is unforgivable. Giving himself a degree in theology, with less than a semester in credits, founding his own church and then ordaining himself "Reverend" and asking to be called by that title are unforgivable. Arrogating to himself the right to attack the society who has given him so much is unforgivable. Worst, though, and most unforgivable is the way he has sought to make 80% of 12% of the population angry at outside influences and blaming them (whites) for everything that is lacking among his group (blacks).

Americans were shocked and stunned at the assassinations in 1968 but we were ready to come together and work together. Jackson was determined that we must not. I was more profitable to sew more and more division among us than we had ever seen before. He's a parasite that feeds off misery and distrust. I believe the author of Shakedown (which book I haven't read, though it's on my reading list) explains what Jackson did after the death of Dr. King and how it affected interracial harmony for decades afterward. It still is affecting our relations, and we will only begin to heal after Jackson shuts up and allows us to begin to trust one another without his fomenting more hatred from which he can continue to profit.

I hope that day is soon.

Mkay, don't it figure

Dennis is playing the best of this hour at least. I hear this call from this poor dolt who thinks "The Jooz" are in charge of everything.

The only comment I have for the ignorance of such a person is the supposed "right-wing" nature of this paranoia, when people like this guy usually express very left-wing points of view. Rephrasing his doltery as right-wing doltery when left-wing complaints are dripping from his lips at a very high rate of speed is a triumph of leftwing propaganda.

One of these days I have to read Saul Alinski.

Prager's rhythm

I'm so glad you said, the other day, that there's a lag between you and the console that plays the Lawrence Welk theme for your Happiness Hour. For years I have been listening to you sing that thing off the beat, and I had concluded that you had a tin ear, especially in light of your annual assertion that to have perfect pitch one must be born with it.

So it turns out that you just have a dead ear when it comes to pitch, not when it comes to rhythm. Good.

"When in doubt, tax."

"And then send it to someone who will return the favor by voting for YOU.

"The country has in a large measure repudiated what democrats believe in."

And this is why I listen to Mr. Prager, in spite of having so many small quibbles with so much of what he says. He is, in those cases, of course always wrong, and I am always right. But meanwhile, in essence, Prager is dead on.

The difference between the two of us, of course, is that he gets to be heard by millions, and I believe this blog has been glanced at by ... five? eight? people, if that.

"Folks, it's time to celebrate"

No kiddin'.

"Airyoodishun"

Dennis, ten years ago I told you this is the wrong way to pronounce "air - uh - dish - 'n". Your pronunciation makes my ears wither. I think you have a bad ear.

Since that date, dictionary.com has arisen with its sound bites of pronunciation. They have "airyoodishun" in there. But they are wrong. And so are you.

My authority to say this comes via William Safire, an "air - uh - dite" man who has written many books on language, the misuse of the English language, and the mispronunciation of American words by silly Americans trying to over-pronounce certain words, including "airy oo dish un". Stop! stop! enough already.

People who say "PEE un ist" and "flout ist" also drive me nuts but it's the guy who says he's very careful about his language while saying airyoodishun that makes my ears curl, almost as badly as the people who say, "between you and I..."

"Politics According to the Bible"

Yes, well, those politics have been co-opted by liberals, who know only one thing about the Bible: Jesus was a commie.

As a commie, Jesus wants rich people to give away all their worldly goods to the poor. If they won't do it willingly, the government must do it.

Mind you, this means only conservative rich people, and does not apply to lefties like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, nor the multitude of billionaires at Google.

Obama: "I probably should have used the word 'opponents' "

Yes, you weasel, you should have. Not "probably" should have, but that's a weasel word that lets you out of apologizing for your hate speech, and still let your pets know that you're still on their side. The Republicans are still the enemy and you can only survive by keeping the hatred boiling among the people you patronize.

Speaking of the Boy Scouts...

Since the Boy Scouts came up, let me talk for a minute about the Girl Scouts.

The Girl Scouts used to have a terrific program for girls. Sadly, it didn't employ Leadership as a feature of the program, as the Boy Scouts' program does. That is the essence of the BSA program--leadership. The essence of the GSA program is service. Girls are required to do hours and hours of service for each of the awards leading up to and including the Gold award (and are specifically disallowed from allowing anyone else do their work for them), but they're never required to lead anything.

The boys, by contrast, lead their patrol, perform duties with a title (such as Historian or Scribe) that requires them to ask others to contribute hours ("When you're at the Council office would you mind getting this information for me please?"), or organize others to get things done. The final project, to achieve the rank of Eagle Scout, requires that they organize many people to do a hundred hours total of community service, such as getting someone to acquire a donation of paint, or directing volunteers to send thank-you notes to donors, or coordinating dozens of people in a huge painting or mowing or sandblasting crew on the morning of the effort.

SO... If you want to learn Service, join the GSA. If you want to learn to lead, join the BSA.

Why don't they know this? I keep seeing women of the GSA bemoan the fact that the Gold Award doesn't have the prestige that the Eagle Scout rank holds. But ladies, try to understand the above. Leadership has to be learned through exercising it; service is a whole different issue.

While I'm contrasting the GSA and the BSA, I'd like to mention their politics. Most people don't realize that the GSA leadership has been taken over by feminists. I don't know what Juliette Gordon Low would have thought of this; I always thought she was herself a feminist, but a feminist a hundred years ago was a whole different critter from today's rabid nutcases. Charming little adaptations to "modernity" have been put into the handbooks, from lesbian relations to how to use a condom at age 9. Watch out.

That's why some conservative feminists (yes, there are such things, they're sometimes called "equity feminists" because they don't go stomping around insisting that men and women are the same and the only difference is socially imposed) started the American Heritage Girls with a similar program (why, oh why, couldn't they put in the Leadership training for today's girls?) but without the gender politics and left-wing politics.

"Give to the Boy Scouts, if you want to give money."

Hear, hear. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the Boy Scouts except that a few hotheads want to accuse them of discriminating against gays.

The troop I volunteered for met across the street from Beverly Hills. The scoutmaster lived in West Hollywood. For our annual popcorn sales fundraiser, we set up a table out in front of the Pavilions in West Hollywood (God bless the manager). We must have had a couple of hundred gay men file past us those two weekends. Most of them stopped and at the very least dropped a dollar into our money can, though no one pressured anyone to do so. Many stopped to chat, many more actually said, "Oh, the boy scouts! I was a boy scout too. How much is the popcorn?"

Not one of them stopped to argue with us for being so evil as not to accept single, childless men as adult volunteers.

Well, that was the official policy. It comports with LDS doctrine, which demands of all adult men that they set the example for the next generation, marry, father children, and lead useful and productive lives. If you don't know anything about the LDS church, I suggest you learn something, else you'll spend the rest of your life saying idiotic things about LDS doctrine, such as "they wear magic underwear"--which only makes the speaker look like a moron and does nothing to detract from the Mormon Church as a religion that millions of decent, educated, respectable people subscribe to. No, I'm not LDS, but I wouldn't be ashamed to be one.

The only problem we had was the occasional liberal feminist that would stop at our table, her face beet red, and scream at us for five minutes about discrimination. I would bet you a thousand dollars that those same women themselves discriminate just as harshly, by (for example) demanding that funding be taken away from the students' union that allowed (never mind paid for) a conservative to speak at the alma mater, or by demonstrating fiercely and noisily outside an auditorium where a republican dared to appear, by demanding that the conservative-authored book in the window at B&N be put in the back room, or by demanding that her party boycott the debate on FOX News. These lefties are the most narrow-minded creatures on the planet.

What is it, "Smart Pants" ?

Can't remember the name of Maxwell Smart?

That makes me so sad. And to say he prefers Norman Rockwell paintings is great, but to substitute the one for the other (in either direction) just does not compute. You might as well try to prefer Beethoven to Louis Armstrong: neither one can nose out the other. You gotta love them both.

"(Two hundred years ago) the only thing being emitted (in London) were horse toots."

Prager can't know much about history. The Industrial Revolution was well under way, there were factories in London, and every home, if it was warmed at all, was heated by coal-burning stoves, fireplaces, or the like. Cooking was over dirty stoves. Livestock lived in the city when the owners could afford it. Horses poooped, they didn't just pass gas. The city had a sewage system, I believe, but many people did continue throwing stuff into the street. Many factories used steam power, heated with coal ... the list goes on and on and on. I've never been surprised to hear that the air back then was putrid and thick enough to cut with a knife. I don't know why you don't know stuff like this. Maybe you should read a book or three by Dickens. Vanity Fair might give you some info. Jane Austen might give you a few pointers on how houses were managed. Probably the Bronte sisters will have some info, ya think? Fielding? Try it, you'll learn something.

"forever redeeming a fallen nation, rather than leading a great one"

Barack Obama has put himself in the position of "forever redeeming a fallen nation, rather than leading a great one."

So says Shelby Steele, one of my favorite authors. Need I say more?

"In the final analysis, what's it (life) all about?"

Prager has settled on "doing good for others."

I can't think of a better goal. One of my religious friends once told me something he had heard in a class on his religion: "God put us here on Earth so that we could let him walk on Earth."

Or, in his words, God could walk this earth without a creature here who appreciated him, but what would be the point? We're here to do God's work and to demonstrate His love to one another and to do the work he would ask us to do. We are meant to act as His hands and feet. I would add that failing to do so is abandoning God.

Remarkably successful propaganda campaign

"You don't have to think to vote for the Left, all you have to know is that you oppose Nazis."

This is the crux of the whole issue. Many people are too lazy to think. Others aren't particularly lazy, and in fact they care about the issue, but nothing they have ever run into in public school teaches them how to approach anything with logic or with a critical approach. It is the triumph of our liberal educators that they have bought so many votes for the left wing, that for the last hundred years they have deprived succeeding generations more and more of their right to be taught good thinking.

My generation, the generation of hippies, didn't start this. But they sure did exploit it. "School shouldn't teach you WHAT to think," ranted the laziest bunch of people ever to land on planet earth, "but HOW to think!" They pounded the table demanding the schools eliminate every minute of "teaching facts to the kids" that could possibly be eliminated. As for the "how to think" part of the curriculum, they replaced that with iconoclasm. It sufficed for them to tell one another (and their elders) that every generation that had come before theirs was stupid, ignorant, didn't know what Life was, didn't appreciate the virtues of hedonism, and insisted there was no such thing as truth (is that true?) and that therefore there was no way to find truth or help anyone else to find truth. Then they threw out all the books that could possibly teach anything and replaced them with Rousseau's child-centered curriculum, where suburban kids should read about suburban experiences, because that's all that they'd be interested in, and inner-city minority kids were fed garbage about drug dealers and prostitutes, appropriately outraging the mothers of these children, whom the hippies subsequently patronized to death.

"These applauses are, i'm finding, more depressing than..."

...the fools who make the statements."

Well, our Left are, among all the things Prager points out, essentially bullies.

A bully only functions well when he has an unresisting victim, and he brings with him a posse of bully wanna-be's who form a backdrop of support for the bully.

In echoing or mirroring what the bully does, the posse gain a large degree of status as they borrow his importance and power. They are only too happy to join in on the game of ridiculing or belittling the target and watching him helplessly cry, run away, or grow to an outraged anger.

Maher's audience are "sharers in the indignation" and they need to promote Reiner's belittling and ridicule so they can bask in it all the more themselves. It's a rare person who steps back from the party and looks at himself and what he's getting out of the bully event, and then says no to it.

"There are people who take care of an infirmed person"

It's "infirm", Prager.

You love to say, "I'm extremely precise in my language."

Yes, you TRY to be, but you make many flubs, and some of them are big flubs. The flubs add up; there are many, many of them. It is to your credit that you work at it and you even take input from people who want to correct you. Except for me. I spend time reading books on English for pleasure. When I was a teenager I sat with my mother's Random House Unabridged Dictionary (copyright date was about 1963, when they were still a prescriptive dictionary, unlike today when they have turned into a descriptive dictionary) in my lap while reading literature and made vocabulary lists from words I needed to learn. I also studied several languages as I grew up, and expanded my vocabulary that way. I loved grammar as a hobby, and had a blast diagramming sentences for fun. All I'm missing is the proper terms for various grammatica. For instance, my elementary and beginning high school grammar texts referred to such verbs as "to be" as "linking verbs." The proper term is "copulative verb", but maybe in the Sixties that term was too risué for public school use.

Back to my point. You're just a wee tad short of the "extremely precise" area and must drop down into the "I TRY to be extremely precise" area. But since you try to be extremely precise, you'd want to use that wording anyway, right?

"So sad, the guy's an anti-semite..."

Prager had a caller who complained that Jews occupied a disproportionate number of seats (almost all of the seats) in the New York State Assembly. He may or may not have been correct, I don't think it matters much toward his argument. Prager wanted to know why this mattered to him?

"Because it's not fair! It's not fair that your people, who make up one or two percent of the population in your state, occupy all the seats..." I'm paraphrasing. Prager was already trying to interrupt this guy, obviously a liberal as revealed in his debating tactic, which conservatives almost never use: the Steam Roller Method. It consists in having a huge speech prepared ahead of time and delivered without taking a breat, and keeps the other person from getting a word in edgewise. It is a common practice among immature debaters to keep the other side from getting its points out. That way, among the immature and untrained (mainly, largely uneducated) among the populace, the steamroller gets only his point of view represented, and since the opposition appears to have no arguments to contribute, the innocent, naive, and uninformed have no reason to change their minds.

But that's not my point. "It's not fair," cries the caller, then adds, via my paraphrase, "You have more legislators than you have constituents. Pragers immediate question should have been, "If there were more than 12% blacks, should we fire them? Should we cap the number of women in the assembly at 50% The Latinos at 22% The African Americans at 12.8%?"

He's asking those questions now, I'm glad to say.

The poor caller has had his mind numbed by decades of howling from the democrat party. He doesn't know that he doesn't want the number of women capped at 50%. He has only thought about how "only" 18% of the members of congress were women (back in the Seventies) and that the appropriate action should be to elect more women to make the numbers "fair". Of course this should mean, to a thinking person, that "fair" numbers means limits as well.

Sorry, they just can't think clearly, they've had that process of thinking squashed by propaganda.

If your marriage is not particularly good, can you name one thing that would turn it around?

1-8Prager-776

That's double seven six, Prager. You said triple.

The question is: can you name one thing your spouse could do that would make the marriage better? Is there an, "If only [Steve] would..." ?

I can think of a number of things that he should have done. "Listen more" was Prager's first example; it was mine too.

When a man hears he doesn't listen enough, he doesn't know what to do with that. We men are spectacular at listening enough; we are spectacular at reading manuals, or getting instructions. If the wife said, "Honey, I was 22.5 minutes of listening time at 6:30 p.m." he would reply "fantastic!"

Here's the female response, and Prager believe it's a problem: "Well, he should know." I think it's a horrible problem, too. There's also "If you loved me you would know" or "would think it out." And women wonder why men are baffled by us.

She should say, "Here's how I know you're listening." There are books on active listening, how to reflect back what she just said (by phrasing it in his own words) and show he's listening. Assertiveness training often covers this stuff.

Dennis is on vacation again

I don't know how long he's been playing "bests of" but I'm disappointed that when I finally get to log in after several days of not listening, I get a "best of". Hope it's not one that I've heard before so I can hear something new.

George Gilder: "Something happened in the twentieth century when the Jews became a dominant intellectual force..."

Sorry, Gilder, but the Jews were a dominant intellectual force in the Nineteenth Century, too.

Since the first time I heard Gilder's thesis that men were evolutionarily driven to rape, I knew he was intellectually vapid. He has never thought through the consequences of this idea.

Sure, a man who raped twenty women would have dispersed his seed among them, maybe five times as much as a man who remains monogamous. Of course, not every rape results in a pregnancy, and the rapist would have to rape a hundred women to conceive even a few babies. Meanwhile, the brothers, husbands, or fathers of the raped women will undoubtedly take action against the rapist. He likely ends up dead before he even spawns three babies.

Okay, so that's two babies produced that wouldn't have been born otherwise. A success? Remember, ancient man killed unwanted babies. Most likely prehistoric man also killed such infants. But what if they didn't, and allowed the un-partnered mother to raise the baby alone? Well, we know that in the hunter-gatherer society, a single woman would hardly succeed to gather enough to keep a baby alive long enough to grow up. End of the rapist's seed, end of the genetic imperative to rape.

Evolutionary psychology is a very discredited field. Gilder should have shut up long ago. There was an article about this in the Wall Street Journal several months ago; I'm astonished Prager didn't read it. When all the factors are taken into account, the numbers show that rape is a very unfavorable way for a strand of DNA to carry on, at least among the human species. But, because Prager loves it as an explanation for his own wandering eye, he continues espousing it twenty years after it was shown to be a fatally flawed theory.

Read and learn, Prager. It's dead.

"If they reallly hate fossil fuel, why don't they support nuclear power?"

Because they're not logical. You can love and hate at the same time. You can be happy and sad over the same issue. True, you're looking at two different aspect of an issue when you're happy and then sad and then both. But they don't think that way, that's too much intelelctual precision for leftists to comprehend. So is some baptist minister reading off a list of OTHER kinds of banned marriages that have nothing else to do with one another, and always in the leftist "brain", that means he's comparing the banned forms of marriage to one another, when the truth is, he's merely listed several kinds of banned marriages in preparation to asking, "From this list, you might pick some and I might pick others, why do you get your way and I'm not supposed to have a place at the table?"

That's too subtle for them.

When liberals took over schools, the schools went down the toilet

I wish I had the time to blow on a blog that no one reads, to expound on this. It is so true, all the "innovations" in education that started a hundred years ago.

Go read Anne of Green Gables, and see what NORMAL, AVERAGE children were expected to do at age ten and eleven and thirteen and fifteen. They were doing every bit as much in Paraguay in the 1970's. Probably we sent some stupid liberals over there and their education system has been destroyed--it matches ours today, no doubt.

Read "Marva Collins' Way" and see what supposedly retarded little black kids were capable of in the 1970's as well--after their school-of-ed teachers wrote them off as incapable of doing anything.

Oh, well, I'm not going on. Children used to learn to read thousands of words in first grade. Then the progressives decided that was too horrible a punishment, implemented the whole word look-see method and ruined the teaching of reading, and fifty years later book publishers were bragging how little they could teach kids in first grade. I'm referring to their bragging in published statements that they only taught the children fewer than 300 words. This was a great accomplishment, allowing the children not to feel threatened by the act of learning.

If you're not vomiting yet, you probably went to a school of education yourself.

France is a good measure of our Left

...because their Left is clear about what they believe.

First, though, you have to get them to agree to the label "Left". They fight it like anything.

We on the right are frequently labeled by the left. It makes the left happy to throw ANY label at anyone. They call us rightwing and though we don't exactly like that label (since the word "wing" is pretty negative), we don't argue about it. A label is just a label, and we also think there is a left wing who ought to be wearing that label. But just try saying someone is "leftwing" or refer to the "left wing" of the democrat party and you're likely in for a fight. Labeling leftists as leftist, or communists as communists (even when they've got the card right there in their wallets) or socialists as socialists--use any word but "progressive" and you have spoken evil. Of course, you know, that means war.

But the left is always at war. I think they're mostly a bunch of unhappy, even miserable, people who blame everything outside themselves for the unhappiness they feel. Their solution is to try desperately to remodel the world by changing everyone else, another cause for the rage they express when you confront them with contrary arguments. "Well," you say, "if we just do suchandso, where will the money come from to pay for it?"

They don't know the answer. They have never thought it through, but they see that you want to stop them. But this has to translate into "you hate", so in retaliation they hate you.

Of course she won the long drive competition, she's a man.

Prager then mentioned he didn't think it would be fair to let "former" men participate in women's sports. That was my first reaction, too. You've had "gender reassignment" surgery but you've still got the same chromosomes you had before. You can claim all day long that you're not a man, you're a woman now, but your chromosomes know better. Your former testes may have stopped flooding your body with testosterone and your current prescription may be flooding your body with estrogen, but the rest of your body is all male.

You're taller, your bones are bigger, your skeleton is broader and larger and there is a lot more room for it to have larger muscles attached. If the LPGA had a special category for "gigantic women and former men" to compete with one another, it would be fair, but failing that, competition should be limited to XY's.

A man who doesn't lust after women whom he's not married to! Prager discovery!

Prager today has discovered "the only man in the world" who doesn't have lustful feelings for women other than his wife. He's baffled, I believe, and is telling this man that he needs to be studied because he's the only such man in the world.

Then for several minutes, he asserts his credentials that give him the right to insist that his "every man" over-generalization is still dead-on correct: he has had couples approach him and tell him he saved their marriage. Goody for you, Prager.

Prager looks at himself, and he looks at a million honest men who admit they wish they had more variety in their women. And because Prager wishes to screw around promiscuously (though of course he reins himself in), he projects to every other man on the planet. He finds a book (George Guilder, discredited evolutionary psychologist) that supports him and for twenty years quotes Guilder's phony arm-chair theorizing as support for his own Prager-centric theorizing.

Another caller, another monogamist, and Prager tells THIS one to get examined as well. Then, I'm not sure, I thought I heard him muttering about lying to oneself. I'm way behind, time-wise, so I can't be sure I heard that or just imagined it.

But what is this, other than narcissism? I feel this, therefore everyone feels this. I can do it, therefore anyone should be able to do it. I respond in such a way, therefore everyone should be able to respond in such a way.

"The average liberal cannot enunciate what they believe in..."

They can't, and that's why they are so vicious in their attacks against the opposition. They try to clarify their positions and support their reasons for holding them, but when they actually look for the language that would explain it, they only come up with, "This is right because I believe it, I believe it because I'm good, I believe it because it's good, therefore it's right, I'm right, my beliefs are right, my beliefs are good, believing good beliefs is good, and you're a genocidal, racist, sexist, xenophobic Nazi."

A better way to TRY talking to them is to ask them for their second-degree thinking, which will be utterly new to them. Don't give them a lecture, just use Thomas Sowell's phrase, "And then what will happen?"

I offer an example. My father quoted me this from a conversation with his (college age) stepdaughter about welfare and her ideas about how many people should be on it. She stated that it wouldn't bother her if half the population lived on welfare. A few deft qustions from my dad told him she had never thought through where those welfare dollars came from. She "knew" that taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor was a good thing, and that doing so was going to allow a hundred million people not to have to work.

She had never thought about how the government mistreats the dollars it seizes, passing it though the hands of unproductive offices, bureaus, and government workers who only shuffle papers around for their living, until that one hundred cents has turned into twenty-eight cents. She had never seen how the pittance that is paid to welfare recipients is so puny that people cannot prosper because of it and are essentially forced either to stay in a world of poverty or are forced to get off the roles and get a job. In spite of this, she "knew" that efforts under Reagan to push people off welfare were evil.

She had never once thought about productivity, and how America's being the most productive country in the world was what made us the country with the higher standard of living in the world, and how if the average amount of productivity were cut almost in half, that our standard of living would crash through the floor, and take these welfare recipients along with it.

And because she has never thought about any of these things, she is a liberal, and "knows" only that taking from the evil rich and giving to the pathetic, helpless, pitiful, incompetent poor is a good thing.

People like this need to learn to think. I'm not worried about their learning to think well; for now, they just need to think at all.

"If they were religious enough their cancer would be cured"

That makes God look disgusting.

Well, it doesn't make God look like anything he isn't. It makes the speaker look bad, though; he appears to think that he has God on puppet strings whereby he is bound by a promise he never made, to give us everything we request.

God is not our cosmic puppet. He doesn't pop out of a tardis (ex machina) to make our lives good in whatever way we have specified. Snap my fingers, you do my bidding, O God, because you promised.

You're right, God often answers, "No". He told Paul no when the latter had appealed to him to cure his pain. After three such requests, God said "no" and Paul submitted to his will. Unlike the name-it-and-claim-it boobies who think God owes them a cure.

"My wife is the only woman in the world who is turned on by discussions of tax policy."

It is just wonderful that your wife is logical. About ten percent of women will tell you they are run by their reason rather than by their feelings; the others will say they want to be honored for their feelings more than for their thoughts, according to Barbara DeAngelis, author of Secrets About Men Every Woman Should Know. Many of us who do run on reason are very proud of our condition and consider ourselves not just exceptional but special. When you claim your wife is the ONLY woman on the planet who thinks logically, you're not just insulting us all, but I believe you're stating a lie.

We thinking-over-feelings women are not devoid of feelings. In occasionally we respond similarly to the feelings-over-thinking. You can hurt us, even if we do rationalize our way out of it.

Similarly, I used to have a game partner (sort of like a tennis partner, though we had to text everything to one another instead of talking) who seemed to consider my being rational as an excuse for him to become abusive about once a week. He would send me a long list of criticisms--most of them very unkindly expressed, or simply not true or--that cut to the core, and then denied me any right to respond to the attack by stating that none of this was "personal", he was just stating the facts. I learned a few years later in The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense that this was a tactic for severely abusing someone, and she labeled it something like "analytical mode", one of many modes in which attackers gave themselves license to put someone else down. Watch out for that.

Like Prager, I like to analyze everything. The day he said, "If I had been on the Titanic I would have drowned trying to find what caused it instead of trying to find a life jacket," I recognized myself. Thank you, Prager; you gave me a way to explain to other people why I'm so curious and why I ask so many questions, or why sometimes I want to continue discussing a subject more thoroughly.

Unfortunately, too many people treat me as a common, feelings-based woman and misinterpret my curiosity or my wish to reason things out as something bad. It's a hard life.

The left of the "art" world crap on institutions that won't hurt them

Amen to that, Prager. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Christians nor with Christian churches nor for that matter with the thing known as "organized religion." But they have done everything they could think of so far (they will think of more as time goes on) to demonize all religious people and religious institutions.

The ugliest tactic is taking our extremists, religious redneck believers, and pretending "this is what christianity will do to you" and overgeneralizing to all of us. The next one is labeling all of us "stupid", as if they weren't themselves devoid of logic or reason.

Al Franken won his race by 375 votes

Actually, Al Franken lost his race narrowly, only a few hundred votes behind. But in the recount he and his cronies threw in hundreds of phony votes. "Oh, my," says a democratic poll worker, "look at this! I forgot and left a hundred votes in my trunk! And isn't this amazing, all hundred of them happen to be for Franken! Gosh, aren't we blessed!"

As Hugh Hewitt says, they can't cheat if it isn't close.

The bigger problem is the news item that appeared last week, telling how a voter registration drive run by people from SEIU turned in well over 23,000 phony registrations in Texas. Imagine how many Franken votes were also phony.

"Fiorina needs to say to Boxer..."

"... Your party got us into this state. You can't possibly blame Republicans as you have overwhelmingly dominated the Assembly and Senate in this state."

How about she face off with Boxer on camera and say, "You're a liar." Sound good?

Prager: "Why is your husband quiet?"

Because he decided early on that it was his privilege not to be bothered in any way with the woman before he wanted sex. He was third-generation Japanese and used that as his excuse but the real reason was that he started a power struggle before we were even married. Part of that fight was refusing to speak to me, refusing to make eye contact, refusing to address me by name or by any pet name. He entertained himself with friends and left the wife and kids sitting at home. But once every three months he'd reach for her for some sex.

He had sex the same way. It was all him, and what made him feel good. He'd never touch me but to make himself feel good. He never did anything unless it turned him on, and he never wanted to see any response from me except what proved he was total stud.

I didn't start this crap. I used to reach for him when we got into bed, and he'd roll away from me and turn his back on me. Looking back after a year of therapy I've been told it was his half of the power grid; he'd have sex when HE damn well pleased, and I wasn't to ask for anything from him. He was a husband the same way. Ask him for sex, you get none; ask him to take out the garbage and that's a solid guarantee the garbage will never get taken out.

In short, my husband was quiet to punish me for breathing.

His name is Stephen Sakamoto, by the way. Just lettin' y'all know.