Bill's Notes

Even Newt says so.

Powerline Blog sums up my thoughts here on the presidential election and what the primary results in North Carolina and Indiana mean.

While I'd hoped that some kind of miracle would give the Republicans a chance in this election, I just don't see it. Sure, maybe something will happen that will swing the election in our favor. Like Obama getscaught in bed with a live man or a dead woman kind of thing.

But barring that or something unforeseen, I don't see how the GOP can win during this election cycle. I'm not giving up, of course. But sometimes you press on with little hope of victory, make the other guys earn it, and be ready if they stumble.

For me, though, I'm going to have to face up to a President Obama in the White House for the next four years. It's strange -- conservatives have regained power with all our important allies, including Canada, France and Germany (even London just elected a conservative mayor). They've finally understood what Dubya was getting at in the War on Terror.

And at this moment, the U.S. has decided to stick its head in the sand and elect the most leftist president in U.S. history. A likely scenario:

* He'll nominate activist judges -- which means millions more unborn children will die and millions of souls, without repentance, will be lost.

* He'll pull us out of Iraq, which will destroy our credibility not only abroad, but at home. He'll release the terrorists from Guantanamo Bay, putting our national security at risk. He'll conduct foreign policy with a naivete not seen since Jimmy Carter, likely with the same results.

* His economic policies will involve greater interventions in the market, which will prevent recovery of this downturn section of a normal business cycle. You can expect higher taxes -- in many cases, much higher taxes. He may scuttle free trade agreements, setting off an international trade war.

* Identity politics at the level normally seen only in universities will come to all of America.

* We made see federalized same-sex marriage, permanently destroying the concept of marriage in this country and declaring traditional and religious culture "bigoted" and most Americans "bigots" -- and more souls will be lost and the entire concept of marriage, already under attack for so long, undermined. The Catholic Church, which had to get out of the adoption business in Massachusetts because of SSM, may face continued pressure to abandon its principles or get out of the charity business.

* He may even prosecute members of the Bush Administration, including Dubya himself and Dick Cheney largely over policy differences, setting a Third-World-style precedent that would damage our centuries-old history of the peaceful transfer of power.

And worse, millions of Americans will cheer this on, having no idea what they're doing.

George Washington and the Founding Fathers stressed that a republic depends on the virtue of the people. When a people no longer remember history, even recent history, when they embrace the same-old heresies in the name of the Imperial Autonomous Self, when they embrace political correctness and other forms of totalitarianism that make it impossible to speak the truth, when they apostasize and declare themselves pagans and non-believers, when they allow themselves to be distracted by trivia and numbed by electronic amusements ranging from Internet pornography to television to video games, when they mock what's holy and sacred and embrace what's perverted and profane, when they feel themselves entitled to try (and fail) to rewrite the laws of nature and natural categories in the name of their own fantasical abstractions ... well, the writing's on the wall. They are spending the moral and religious capital of the past, and while in the U.S.'s case, it's a lot, it's not infinite.

Of course, Obama isn't the problem as much as a symptom of a fundamental underlying spiritual and moral rot in the Democratic Party. Decades of supporting abortion-on-demand has so damaged its ethos that it now, unashamedly and even brazenly, supports the culture of death in all its facets.

The Catholic Church makes it clear what it means to vote for a "pro-choice" politician -- it imperils your soul. Then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict 16) said in 2004:

"A Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil, and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion, if he were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate's permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia.

"When a Catholic does not share a candidate's stand in favor of abortion and/or euthanasia, but votes for that candidate for other reasons, it is considered remote material cooperation, which can be permitted in the presence of proportionate reasons."

Proportionate reasons. That is, something would offset 4,000 daily killings of the most vulnerable members of our society, not to mention that perversion of reason involved in supporting that. One possible: Voting for a politican whose position on abortion is less extreme than another's.

Obama, as a Illinois legislator, fought for partial-birth abortion. He's a scissors-in-the-head guy.

Lest I beat up on the Democrats too much, let me make it clear -- it was the Republicans who gave this ground to the Democrats.

Dubya over-reached in certain areas, such as secret courts and secret CIA prisons and to an extent, interrogation tactics. Rather than simply bomb Afghanistan back to the pre-stone age, Dubya got us involved in two nation-building projects, which, frankly, usually don't work at the point of a gun, or even not at the point of a gun. Nonetheless, somehow our military has put up a hell of an effort -- and we've got a shot at succeeding, at least in Iraq.

Other over-reaches and eff-ups: Rather than put together a commonsense approach to airline security (such as El Al's, which involves profiling), he went with a PC-style security system that humiliates everyone and treats everyone as a suspect. The GOP spent like drunken sailors and oversaw one of the largest increases in the U.S. budget in history and damaged the economy with massive deficits. He has twice sent out needless, politically motivated and budget-busting tax rebates.

He (and the GOP) allowed the dollar to get weak, didn't intervene during the housing bubble with timely regulation, over-reacted to Enron with the disastrous Sarbanes-Oxley (which dampened our long economic expansion during his tenure), and put together the nonsensical No Child Left Behind Act, which demands, the nearest I can tell, all children to be above average - and vastly increases the Feds' role in state and local concerns, namely, the education of children.

Worse, the GOP isn't supposed to stand for any of those things: Less business regulation, budgetary discipline, lower spending, not nation-building. not tax rebates, not federal intervention in state and local matters, common sense, not PC, security solutions, sound fiscal policies, and intervening in markets only when it's clear that rampant and irresponsible speculation has taken over (e.g., the housing bubble), and the rule of law. When I voted for Dubya and the GOP, I didn't vote for any of those over-reaches. Yet there they are.

And worst of all, despite his fundamental decency, he was a terrible communicator. And we in the GOP all knew that last point when we nominated him in 2000. The fault is not in the stars, but in ourselves.

And because of that, the Dems have an opportunity they never should've had.

Last, let me make it clear that while the Democratic Party is for the most part the Party of Sin, Sickness, Evil and Death, its members are not necessarily so. According to Christian teaching, we are not fighting our fellow man -- our battles against each other are manifestations of a spiritual battle -- a clash of worldviews, a clash that cannot be won with words, or even elections, but only by God and our ability to love one another. You rarely can talk someone to the truth about abortion (and that's the central moral issue with Democrats)-- you can only love them, one person at at time, until they think and feel and experience the sanctity of human life at such a deep level that abortion seems unthinkable, and horrific.

Remember what Paul says in Ephesians, "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places."

Of course, the future being what it is, unpredictable, Obama may turn out to betray all those leftist principles and end up selling out the Democrats worse than the Democrats sold us out.

I'll bet this post generates comments :)

The sun is shining through the canopy here in the Poconos. It's a little chilly, but will warm up soon enough. One nice thing -- I just finished up washing-and-drying a quilt. It's a little thing, but one of life's simpler pleasures is pulling a warm quilt out of a dryer on a cold morning.

I'm working at home. Got my morning Diet Coke. But, alas, four deadlines this week. Lots to do!

I had a good weekend. One interesting thing: I went to see the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre (pronounced wilkesberry) Yankees yesterday. Unfortunately, they won. But one thing about the game -- never quite heard a mix of songs quite like that one. Must've been designed by committee. They played clips including Hava Nagila, the Velvet Underground's Rock and Roll and Red Hot Chili Peppers' Dani California. Plus, some hip-hop selections I've never heard of. Something for everyone, I suppose.

I was rooting for the Durham Bulls, but grew impatient with them. The pitcher threw fastballs, fastballs, fastballs and just didn't mix it up. He was also trying to blow the ball by the batters -- which you can't do in Triple AAA. In fact, I just said, "If this guy doesn't mix in some off-speed pitches, he's gonna get tagged." Two pitches later a Yankee knocked one over the left field fence for a three-run home run. Anyway, the Yankees won 9-5, but if you consider four runs came after two-out errors by the first baseman, the game was closer than it looked. That first baseman also made the last out of the game. Hard day for him, I suppose.

Great little stadium, too. Too bad the loathsome Yankees play there.

That's all. Hope all's well ...

Harry's written a beautiful story over at his blog. Check it out.

I've never seen a ghost, and never want to. But I've had visions.

Obama apparently couldn't remember the month or the location of his last campaign stop.

Reminds me of 1996, when Bob Dole mixed up San Francisco and San Diego and the song Stay, where Jackson Browne doesn't remember if the next stop is Chicago or Detroit.

Anyway, the funny thing about the 96 Dole was he was hammered for calling the Dodgers "Brooklyn." My old man still calls the Dodgers "Brooklyn" on occasion.

And I often still mistakenly refer to the Colts as "Baltimore."

Time and travel get to all of us.

As Montgomery Burns once said [paraphrasing from memory], "Young man! I need to send this missive to the Prussian consulate in Siam - post haste! Am I too late for the afternoon auto-gyro?"

I may not have mentioned it here, but an ex-girlfriend of mine heads up a major national television news network in a certain third-world country. Anyway, I've found out that her network just started partnering with Al Jazeerah to carry their English-language broadcasts. Just lovely.

WTF, over?

I've been working and socializing lately and I didn't realize quite what Rush Limbaugh has been up to.

Um, manipulating the Democratic Primaries?

Yes, it's of course all within the rules.

But you know, just because something's allowed doesn't mean you should do it. Especially Republicans!

Bottom line: This is wrong, and I denounce it in the highest possible terms. This is not the Rush I knew 20 years ago.

Here's an article that questions whether college is worth it.

RTWT, as they say.

I've written about this before. I was extremely lucky when I went to college. Seton Hall was very catholic in this sense -- it was willing to teach you as much or as little as you wanted to know. You could skate by, or you could dig deep and really learn. The class sizes were small. The professors were usually pretty good and available. The price wasn't that high.

Granted, the facilities were terrible and ancient, and in an attempt to change that, SHU conducted an ambitious building project that meant my final three years on campus involved walking around various construction sites. (This was on a tiny campus to begin with.)

Was it worth it? In my case and in the case of most the people I knew, yes. Is it true anymore? Don't know. Haven't had a resume cross my desk from ole alma mater -- well, ever. And I've been hiring people for eight of the past 10 years.

Obviously, I support McCain. But shit ... who wants to win this time around? It will require real leadership. Hopefully, McCain can provide it.

BTW, those who complain about our final three candidates ought to consider the repercussions of the viciousness of our presidential politics, and especially the campaigns. Do you think many qualified leaders haven't considered the presidency and then thought -- who needs that shit?

Besides, we had many qualified folks on the Republican side, in particular. McCain won.

Unfortunately, we Republicans are a little late to the dance on this one. We should've picked McCain in 2000. That was his time. Instead, we put forth a not-ready-for-prime-time candidate who best quality was name recognition.

And we forgot what that name stood for. George Bush the Elder's presidency had high oil prices, a severe recession (worse than the one we had now), higher taxes, increased spending, and a wasted Supreme Court appointment (Souter). But at least Bush the Elder knew foreign policy and did a great job with it. So Dubya was about name recognition, but we forgot the problems of Bush I, hoping the son was more conservative. Plus, the Republicans were elected to keep down spending and finish the Reagan Revolution, and instead restarted the Nixon presidency. (Nixon greatly expanded government, and his economics were dismal.)

BTW, while I did support Bush after the primaries (supported McCain before the nomination), I had deep, deep misgivings about him at the time. In fact, when he was elected, I thought, "My God, what have we done?"

So now we're in the shit. A candidate like Obama, who we should easily beat -- we're probably gonna lose to him.

And then, as Republicans, we've got two choices:

1. He'll suck as president. So things will get worse, which none of us want.

2. He won't suck as president. He'll straighten things out on the economic side. Then, well, things will get better, and that will be great, economically. But we as Republicans will be out of power for a very very long time after that. Now who cares if the GOP loses if things are better? Well, during that time, virtually the entire left-wing social agenda will be codified in law. We won't reverse abortion. Identity politics will become extremely problematic. Does anyone want to live in a country run with the speech-codes of the Brown University English Department?

So at this point, I give up on who I want to win. Let things unfold as they may. I'll still support McCain, because I want our guy to win and to have the chance to unscrew the pooch. But I have to admit that the current situation is a real muddle to me -- not so much in terms of what needs to be done, or should be done. What's muddled is what I think is politically possible right now -- and I think the current political possibilities leave us, as they did in the 70s until Reagan came along, falling short of what we need to do.

The Anchoress here.

Of the countless stirring moments we have seen or heard about over the six days of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the United States, one image has struck me as the most moving and deeply meaningful of the whole sojourn: the moment when the 81-year-old bishop of Rome exited his shiny, protective popemobile to walk down the last part of the ramp leading to the small gathering at Ground Zero.

Many times this past week Benedict revealed himself to have an exquisite sense of proportion, of knowing what is appropriate to the moment — and never more so than at the footprint of the North Tower. At his age, in the chill morning, the pope might have been excused for slowly motoring down to the assembly, but he instead shed a worldly trapping of convenience and made his solemn way.

Read the whole thing.

Oops, an ice age is on its way. According to this guy.

*******

Now that we're doom-mongering, let's go for it:

The earth is warming until mankind gives up fire.

We're also overdue for a new ice age which will make most of the world's land masses inhabitable.

The earth's magnetic field has been weakening for 2,000 years and we're overdue for one of earth's periodic axis shifts, which will obviously destroy most life on the planet.

We're gonna get hit by an asteroid, which will obviously destroy most life on the planet.

The star Betelgeuse may have already gone supernova, and will hit us with three days of continual X-rays some time in the next 500 years, severely degrading most life.

A big volcano will blow up and darken the world for years, killing most life.

Earthquakes, tsunamis, flood, famine, mass death.

Pestilence, manmade or otherwise, accidental or on purpose, terrorist or state-sponsored warfare.

Antibiotics are only one step ahead of stronger, more powerful bacteria that will wipe out a large percentage of mankind.

We're running out of fuel.

We're overpopulating the earth.

We're running out of fresh water.

Ruinous wars over declining resources are inevitable.

Technology is getting close to the point where a small cadre of humans with a grudge can create mass murder on a scale imaginable only by nation-states a few decades ago. Stealing a nuke and using it to blow up a nuclear power plant could render thousands of square miles inhabitable for decades or centuries.

Even if a small group of people don't do it, rogue nation-states may still blow up a good part of the world and cause nuclear winter.

Even if we don't blow ourselves up on purpose, we may still do on accident.

The 12th Imam may come back. The anti-Christ and the beast may show up. The Jewish messiah may finally show up. Siva, the god of death, may return.

Even if none of this happens, we may still build a technological dystopia based on entertainment, distraction and consumerism that numbs what remains of our souls so that we'd wish all the above had happened a long time ago.

And worst of all, if and when any of this happens, someone's last words will be, "I told you so."

******

Bottom line: You want negative. That's negative.

You won by 10%, and picked up an extra six delegates or so. Gotta love the Democratic Party primary system.

UPDATE: With all the returns in, Hillary picked up 14 delegates. All that effort and money ... a 10-point margin of victory ... for 14 delegates.

The New York Times finally gets around to discovering a big hidden problem in blogging -- breakups. And in some cases, divorces. Here's the story.

Here's the blog cited in the article. (NSFW -- she posts herself nude on the Net -- and perhaps she should rethink that. At least softer lighting.)

Just one more way technology makes our lives so much richer :)

Everyone has some internal tension -- we have doubts about our thoughts, questions whether we've gotten things right, stuff we speculate about. Then there's stuff we want to say, but don't want to publicize to potentially the whole world via the Internet.

Over the past four years, I have accumulated 185 unpublished posts that exist on this blogging interface. At this point, that counts as a counter-blog, the blog-behind-the-blog.

Does anyone else have a counter-blog?

Even in the blinding sunshine of today, where spring has finally, most definitely sprung, I find my thoughts returning to Africa. The river was the Ogooue, and I only traveled upriver for about four hours near Lambarene, home of Albert Schweitzer's hospital, but I find myself thinking about it, briefly — another existence. And yes, we saw hippos:

Going up the river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an inpenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of the sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side.

The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands, you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself cut off forever from everything known once - somewhere far away - in another existence perhaps. There were movements when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not had a moment to spare to yourself; but it came back in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.

Harry recently read a book and reviewed it on his blog.

Here is the response (with some additions) that I left.

*****

I've mentioned before, in fact frequently, that if AGW is true, we are FUBAR unless nature has a self-regulating climate mechanism to compensate for our behavior.

To combat AGW would require a level of cooperation among peoples never before seen, and that is frankly, flies in the face of everything we know about the human race.

Mankind has never gotten buy in from everyone on the planet to do anything that massive. We've eradicated a few diseases, yes, and we've made progress in many areas.

But I can't imagine MANKIND disowning FIRE. And we'd have to get damned close to that to combat AGW. Even if you shut down all the cars and factories, we'd still have seven billion cold, hungry, naked monkeys needing to burn things to keep warm and cook their food. So you'd have massive deforestation, plenty of fire and smoke, and CO2 and other gases in the atmosphere.

If AGW is true, then that is our destiny, short of a natural compensation or massive government interventions (which realistically, would require totalitarianism, tyranny and genocide).

Our species dies on the AGW hill if AGW is true, and takes a lot more species with us. On the other hand, it would be a good time to be a tropical fish.

Unless ... and this is a big unless ... unless we find a way to make energy out of something else that doesn't produce greenhouse gases. Geothermal is our best long-term prospect — as I've said before, the earth is a giant fireball with a thin layer of crust that's mostly made of water. It's practically a steam engine already. But there's also solar, wind, nuclear, and who knows what's beyond the horizon.

Getting to that point fast enough is the only hope we have in mankind's control (if AGW is true). That will require an advanced, fossil-fueled technological economy that will allow those inventions to come to pass.

Because we cannot, knowing our human history, sacrifice our way out of it. We might and probably will invent our way out of it. If AGW is true.

And chances are, given man's natural propensity for inventing stuff and trying to find/create cheap energy, technological solutions fall entirely within what we know about mankind. We are clever monkeys. We're going to do it anyway.

Thus, don't despair. There is only despair if you see mankind trying to do what he cannot do by his nature, that is, get along with everyone. However, there is great hope if mankind does what he's always done — make tools.

Yes, we monkeys are slow, weak, poorly balanced, possess poor hearing, olfactory nerves and eyesight, and have little in the way of claws or teeth. We are also contentious, contrary, rebellious, proud and unforgiving.

But we have big brains, language, opposable thumbs, and natural curiosity. And we are this world's masters of fire. Don't bet against us.

Golly, after the argument made for same-sex "marriage" removed a key limit on eligibility for marriage, we couldn't see this one coming.

Funny thing is some people will be so hardened by pragmatism and relativism they won't be able to argue against this. After all, if you can't have the "yuck" factor for sodomites, you can't really have it for relatives, either.

BTW, the costs of same-sex marriage and insistence on the normalization of homosexuality have already been high.

Letters-to-the-editor writers, bloggers and blog-commenters sued, hauled before "Human Rights" commissions, fined, and in some cases, enjoined from writing their opinions, in Canada.

A New Mexico photographer forced to pay $6,600 in legal fees to a lesbian couple after she turned down their offer to photograph their "wedding."

The Catholic Church having to get out of the adoption business in Massachusetts.

Justices of the Peace fired in Massachusetts because they disagreed with the state supreme court decision removing the concept of gender from marriage.

Not to mention The Episcopal Church's tossing out orthodox bishops and priests so they justify their sodomite bishop in NH.

And so the cultural battle continues.

For my part, I wasn't insulted. Thought this was pretty funny.

The problem with reading inside-baseball stories about federal governance is it makes you feel both angry and powerless. There is nothing I can do personally about the fact that the senate isn't filling judicial vacancies. Nothing.

So why is the Wall Street Journal telling me this?

A lot of pundits, frankly, aren't really talking to us. Oh sure, we're supposed to buy their newspapers, but really, they want to use us to influence others.

Wall Street Journal: Just leave me alone.

You could grep (or google, for you GUI types) the memories in your brain?

Obviously.

Right now I'm trying to remember who said this one thing to me, and it's just like 1/100 of a memory. I remember the context, but I don't remember where I was or who I was with. Granted, it occurred between 1980-88, so there might be a reason ...