Some of Bobbins' COVID Memes

 

First Rally at the Capitol

 Our first "protest" was before this, driving around honking against the lockdown. This was the first rally Bobbins and her folks went at the State Capitol.

AZ March for Life

The afternoon after the first soccer game saw the older 4 and I heading downtown for the AZ March for Life. The kids' school had a good turn-out, and we saw a lot of our friends.

Trumpism the New Punk Rock

I thought this was a pretty good article comparing the Trump movement to 1970s punk rock:

Wattenberg says Trumpism was "an insurrection against Conservatism Inc." — a political establishment that had become flabby, complacent, and self-indulgent in the same way that 1970s progressive rock music had grown bombastic, pretentious, and long-winded. Whereas Republicans before Trump had been terrified of deviating from orthodox positions on trade, the desirability of immigration, or the wisdom of the Iraq war, Trump thumbed his nose at this orthodoxy.

Then there's Trump's seeming amateurism — his "inexperience and rawness," Wattenberg says. Just as punks weren't trained musicians, Trump is frequently assailed for not playing politics the right way, that is, the professional way. When Wattenberg hears the media establishment pounce on Trump for falsehoods, misstatements, or exaggerations, he hears echoes of musical sophisticates belittling punk rock for its primitivism. Trump may get lost in the details, but he gets the big things attitudinally right. Put another way: He may know only three chords, but Wattenberg says his followers hear the "right three chords."

Gas

I found this old receipt in the Camry the other day. I'm pretty sure it was from a stop in Quartzsite, although I don't know what we were doing there in March. I'm sure you all remember paying this much for gas. I never thought it would come back down to below $2 a gallon, let alone under $1.50. The other day I filled up the Sequoia for only $26! I can remember paying $60 to fill up the Camry. If there's one good part of the Iran deal, it's that they flooded the already-glutted market with their crude, driving the price of oil even lower. At the AM-PM by our old house 87 grade gas is currently $1.29/gallon.

AZ March for Life

Bobbins' brother Mark and his family were in town to see family (who had come in for Paul's wedding, which didn't happen). They joined Bobbins and our kids to do the AZ March for Life. I had to work, unfortunately. They had a great time.

Planned Butcherhood

Like the six people who read this blog, I'm sure, I was very angered by the Planned Parenthood videos released by the Center for Medical Progress. I don't see how anyone can argue that they don't expose PP for the evil they are. It's depressing and sickening that the releases haven't caused more of an uproar. One reason conservatives are so mad at the 'Establishment' is that Congress couldn't even get through a vote to defund PP.

At any rate, I took the girls and met Katie at the PP HQ in AZ for the big nationwide protest in August. After the fact I thought maybe they might've been too young for it, but it was a good lesson for them in confronting evil and standing up for the innocent. It was pretty hot, and the PPers were backed by a loud soundsystem/DJ, but we had several hundred to challenge the lie that is that organization. God help us.

What Marriage Has Become

The traditional, conjugal view of marriage began its transformation (demise?) with the divorce revolution of the 1960s.  Making it easier to end a marriage slowly altered the very definition of the institution, which I don't think most people at the time realized.  So the current "same-sex marriage" movement didn't start the process, but is moving it farther.  I'll be really curious to see what marriage is like in another two generations, when my grandkids are tying the knot.  It's a scary prospect.

This thought really hit me after reading this quote from Daniel Foster's column in the back of National Review on 3 November 2014:

"...so long as marriage was a covenant with the eternal, it was not just outside the purview of politics but logically prior to it.  Conversely, when marriages are a bureaucratic stamp of approval for a very expensive party, a mere matter of tax-filing statuses and feelings, it seem petty to use the levers of the state to bless some and ban others."

Difficulties and Quotes

Been having technical difficulties at home for almost a month now.  The fan on our laptop went kaput, causing it to overheat quickly and shut down.  Then our Blu Ray and streaming player went out.  Got that fixed fairly easily with a google chromecast and a cheap new DVD player.  Just last week caved in and bought a new laptop after Bobbins and I unsuccessfully tried to fix the old one.  Bobbins actually got it working again, cleaning out the fan, but popped the keyboard in the process.  I'm currently backing up the old machine to an external hard-drive.  We should be back to full speed shortly, after vacation.

In the meantime, here's some quotes I enjoyed recently.  From the Catholic Sun's article on the canonization of John XXIII:

"In reply to a reporter who asked, 'How many people work in the Vatican?,' he reportedly said: 'About half of them.'"

"He once wrote: 'There are three ways to face ruin - women, gambling, and farming.  My father chose the most boring one.'"

"A Vatican official told the pope it would be 'absolutely impossible' to open the Second Vatican Council in 1963.  'Fine, we'll open it in 1962.  And he did."

From a review of Marriage and Civilization: How Monogamy Made Us Human, a new book by William Tucker:

"Tucker closes the book by posing a question:  Will we honor marriage or will we create a 'kind of state polygamy where women congregate around the major source of wealth--the government--while men slink off into their separate quarters to pursue a fading warrior culture--played out this time on video games?'  Will we honor the most noble aspect of human nature--one that doesn't come 'naturally' but requires work and rules to make us flourish?"

What is Sex?

As always, G.K. Chesterton is instructive:

Sex is an instinct that produces an institution; and it is positive and not negative, noble and not base, creative and not destructive, because it produces this institution. That institution is the family; a small state or commonwealth which has hundreds of aspects, when it is once started, that are not sexual at all. It includes worship, justice, festivity, decoration, instruction, comradeship, repose. Sex is the gate of that house; and romantic and imaginative people naturally like looking through a gateway. But the house is very much larger than the gate. There are indeed a certain number of people who like to hang about the gate and never get any further.

Catholics Too Tied to Republicans

Some great points by R.R. Reno in the upcoming issue of First Things:

Today theological liberalism is no longer a force in the churches. We have in that sense won, and won decisively. In the Catholic Church, most theological liberals argue for their right to exist rather than assume they will determine the future direction of Christianity.

This is no longer true. Over the last twenty years, the percentage of Americans declaring themselves religiously unaffiliated (the Nones) has grown dramatically, now having reached 20 percent. Moreover, this group has become politically powerful and is now a large and favored constituency in the Democratic party. The Obama campaign calculated that it could energize this base of support (remember the “war on women”) without damaging its electoral chances. For the first time in American politics, a winning party took a tacitly anti-religious stance.

The consequences? First, religiosity now strongly correlates with partisan loyalty. Nones are overwhelmingly Democrat. Regular churchgoers, especially but not exclusively Evangelicals, trend ­Republican. This politicizes religion. Second, religious people are becoming more and more dependent on the Republican party to protect their interests (religious liberty, for example). We could easily become a taken-for-granted base largely irrelevant to the party’s larger policy debate, as African-Americans often are in the Democratic party. Third, religion, especially orthodox Christianity, may end up implicated in the inevitable failures and corruptions of the Republican party. We may be in danger of recapitulating in some ways the disastrous alliances of the Catholic Church with the European right in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Ross Douthat nicely riffs off these to make his own larger point, which is a good reminder:

I think this analysis suggests a positive case, in the American context at least, for a papacy that simultaneously calls U.S. Catholics away from a too-close entanglement with the fortunes and platform of the Republican Party, and that consistently reminds non-Catholics and non-Christians that there is more to Christianity than the particular set of issues that have (understandably) kept many American believers in a right-of-center political orbit. This is, again, something that the last two popes did as well — but if Pope Francis’s public profile continues to come across as more “liberal” than theirs, it might actually play a helpful role in complicating the “partisan captivity” scenario that Reno sketches out.


 

Equality of Use

Provocative "Sex on Campus" article in the New York Times on Sunday.  Not surprisingly, the piece skews toward wealthy white elites in choosing the campus and co-ed's of the University of Pennsylvania.  Despite its biases, it's a well-written and honest sketch of common attitudes about sex amongst college-age Americans.  It's a scary picture.  The author extolls the fact that young women now act like men in the sexual marketplace:  quick easy hook-up's over real relationships, hook-up buddies over boyfriends.  This is cause for celebration from a feminist standpoint in achieving equality of the sexes.  As the title and photo suggest, now she can do it too.

What's most disturbing to me isn't the equality, although that's a problem too, as women are the ones who should regulate sexuality (basically keep men in check), not de-regulate it into a contact-sport-like free-for-all.  What's really disturbing is the dehumanizing quality of these interactions.  People are getting together and in many cases engaging in the most intimate act between two people simply for personal pleasure.  The other person is not an object of love or affection but of animalistic desire.  The other person is more or less an object to be used to feel good.  Love and by extension sex should be about giving of yourself.  But in the norms discussed in the article, it's all about taking for yourself with minimal regard for the other.  Quite a sad perversion of what it can be.

And do the women at Penn really enjoy the sex?  Men, of course, do, and have few qualms about it (generally speaking, of course).  Do the women really enjoy being used in this manner, even if they're also the users themselves?  How is this situation fulfilling for women at all?

Well, Here We Go

"Gay marriage" is just about equality, love, ending discrimination, all that great stuff.  Riiiiight...

Paula Ettelbrick, Executive Director of the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, stated a clear understanding of what redefinition was all about in her article “Since when is Marriage a Path to Liberation?”:

…being queer is more than setting up house, sleeping with a person of the same gender, and seeking state approval for doing so…Being queer means pushing the parameters of sex, sexuality, and family, and in the process, transforming the very fabric of society…We must keep our eyes on the goal…of radically reordering society’s view of reality.

In similar form gay activist and talk radio host Michelangelo Signorile argued that the best plan

“might be to fight for same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, [to] redefine the institution of marriage completely”; that is, “to demand the right to marry not as a way of adhering to society’s moral codes, but rather to debunk a myth and radically alter an archaic institution that as it now stands keeps us down.”

Some of the articles I read tonight pointed out that defenders of traditional marriage have to move on, to retreat from the marriage battle (being lost in the culture anyway) and move toward defending religious liberty, as churches will come under attack for discrimination on a number of fronts.  Makes sense.

I also wonder what the next big civil rights struggle is going to be.  Now that the Left got gay marriage, what are they going to agitate for next?  What class of people need the sympathy and action of the do-gooders?  The disabled?  Probably not, since the Left is digging in (and losing ground) on abortion and is moving toward euthanasia.  I'm not sure who.  Maybe animals.  Guess it wouldn't have to be a class of people.  The cult of environmentalism might stage a come-back.  I don't really see them going after guns that much but you never know.  Whatever it is, I'm sure the traditional, Founders' notion of liberty won't be involved.

Snowden is a Traitor

Obviously the title of this post reveals my position on the NSA leaker Edward Snowden, who in my estimation betrayed incredible trust put in him, violated many agreements he signed, and broke the law.  He is NOT a whistleblower, as there are established channels for reporting wrongdoings without exposing classified (Top Secret nonetheless, which means grave damage) information.

David Brooks' column on Snowden is pretty interesting looking at how the young man's actions are emblematic of similarly-aged guys of his generation:

From what we know so far, Edward Snowden appears to be the ultimate unmediated man. Though obviously terrifically bright, he could not successfully work his way through the institution of high school. Then he failed to navigate his way through community college.  ...

Though thoughtful, morally engaged and deeply committed to his beliefs, he appears to be a product of one of the more unfortunate trends of the age: the atomization of society, the loosening of social bonds, the apparently growing share of young men in their 20s who are living technological existences in the fuzzy land between their childhood institutions and adult family commitments.

The Internet Is a Surveillance State

Some pretty good points in this column by Ross Douthat:

The motto “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” — or, alternatively, “abandon all privacy, ye who enter here” — might as well be stamped on every smartphone and emblazoned on every social media log-in page. As the security expert Bruce Schneier wrote recently, it isn’t that the Internet has been penetrated by the surveillance state; it’s that the Internet, in effect, is a surveillance state....

And every looming technological breakthrough, from Google Glass to driverless cars, promises to make our every move and download a little easier to track. Already, Silicon Valley big shots tend to talk about privacy in roughly the same paternalist language favored by government spokesmen. “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know,” Google’s Eric Schmidt told an interviewer in 2009, “maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

The problem is that we have only one major point of reference when we debate what these trends might mean: the 20th-century totalitarian police state, whose every intrusion on privacy was in the service of tyrannical one-party rule. That model is useful for teasing out how authoritarian regimes will try to harness the Internet’s surveillance capabilities, but America isn’t about to turn into East Germany with Facebook pages.

For us, the age of surveillance is more likely to drift toward what Alexis de Tocqueville described as “soft despotism” or what the Forbes columnist James Poulos has dubbed “the pink police state.” Our government will enjoy extraordinary, potentially tyrannical powers, but most citizens will be monitored without feeling persecuted or coerced.

 
As I tell people all the time, you should much more worry about what facebook, google, and Apple -- all of whom competently put the information to good use -- collect on you than what the incompetent government does.

Preview of Obamacare

From Montreal, Quebec, Canada:

A leading Montreal gynecologist said that these days, she cannot look her patients in the eye because the wait times are so shocking. Lack of resources, including nursing staff and budget compressions, are driving a backlog of surgeries while operating rooms stand empty. The latest figures from the provincial government show that over a span of nearly 11 months, 7,780 patients in the Montreal area waited six months or longer for day surgeries, while another 2,957 waited for six months or longer for operations that required hospitalization.
full article

Election Read-Out

Pretty depressed with the national outcome last night, obviously.  Romney could even match McCain's total, and Obama carried Paul Ryan's district...  The country is lost, and cannot be saved, as indicated by the sign at my buddy Dennis's house last night.  I fear we've crossed the Rubicon toward European social democracy.  We've reached the point where enough people who prefer to have Uncle Sam take care of them vote the Democrats into office to make that happen.  The 'people' would rather receive a check than take care of themselves.  And 'gay marriage' seems to have reached its tipping point.

This Corner post by Michael Walsh is probably the best analysis of the meaning of the loss I read.  I also liked this post's honest assessment of the situation.

As was pointed out to me today, "This too shall pass."  Looking on the bright side, Obama will inherit the mess of his own making.  And on the state level, Arizona did pretty well -- Flake won, Arpaio (whom I don't like) will remain a juicy thorn in the Left's side, the open primaries initiative failed, and the permanent extension of the 'temporary' tax cut also went down.  Would liked to have seen Parker win (we would've been represented by a Republican for the first time ever!) and bummed about Kirkpatrick, but on the whole positive.  So there's that.  And the fact that the Republican bench is quite deep, including lots of governors.  2016 only four years away.

Big Election

They say every election is the most important ever, but I do think this one is quite momentous, as a lot of the pundits have been writing.  Charles Krauthammer's weekend column said it best.

"An Obama second term means that the movement toward European-style social democracy continues, in part by legislation, in part by executive decree. The American experiment — the more individualistic, energetic, innovative, risk-taking model of democratic governance — continues to recede, yielding to the supervised life of the entitlement state.

If Obama loses, however, his presidency becomes a historical parenthesis, a passing interlude of overreaching hyper-liberalism, rejected by a center-right country that is 80 percent nonliberal."
I also liked this column by Ross Douthat (who is predicting an Obama win) and this one by Peggy Noonan.

I'm very cautiously optimistic about Romney pulling it out tomorrow.  I think the media is portraying it close because they ideologically want it that way but mostly for the drama and therefore ratings.  One of my buddies at work is confident enough that Romney will win that he's hosting a party to that effect, which I plan to attend.  Sure hope to be celebrating rather than sulking, like in 2008 when I tried to work while some of the guys got all excited at Obama's "soaring" speech in Grant Park.  I'm pretty sure most of them lost that magical hopey-changey feeling.  Now I'm hoping for change, to be delivered from the Obama program.

Whedon on "Zomney"

It's probably a mark of my cynicism that for a minute I thought this video might be a parody of the anti-Romney line, but upon further thought and discussion, it's just plain anti-Romney.  Still, I did get a laugh out of it.  To Whedon, I ask that he please get back behind the camera and stick to making great movies like The Avengers instead of lecturing us about how Romney hates the poor.  I bet Romney gave 10x more to charity than Whedon has.

2012 Ballot

Pretty easy vote this year, at least for President and Vice President, Senator, and Representative.  We sent our early ballots in today.  We voted for Paul Ryan for VP as much as for Romney.  I doubt I'd ever vote for a Democrat, but their anti-life policies sure make it easy not to.  Ecstatic not to be in Ed Pastor's district anymore and hopeful that Vernon Parker (who I'm not very fond of) will triumph over Sinema.  The nicest surprise of all would be for State Senate.  Oddly enough, I actually know both candidates.  I've drank and hung out with Chad Campbell and like him as a guy but disagree with his politics.  Here's hoping Auggie Bartning wins the seat.