"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.