Junk food stamps

Minnesota Seeks Ban on Junk Food Stamps
Why is this a big deal? The government has every right to determine what funds it supplies can and can not be spent on.

"Angel Buechner, a working mother of four boys, says junk food is a bad buy for people who use food stamps like her family, but she doesn't believe the federal government has the right to prevent her from buying something special for her sons."

If junk food is that important to you buy it with money from your own pocket. Food stamps are to keep people from going hungry not to buy special treats. The government has a vested interest in seeing that as many people as it has influence over eat mostly healthy food. Lower bills now and lower medical bills in the future.

Family politics

My maternal grandmother died on Wednesday night. She was 82 and had been very ill for several years. We had been expecting her death for at least a year now so I'm not too traumatized by it. But like any good West Indian family there is lots of drama surrounding my grandmother's death. I would like to say that grief is making people say and do dumb things but I would be lying. My parents and one of my sisters leave for Barbados on Monday to referee the ensuing madness. I wish I could go as well but we've got too many doctor's appointments this week and not enough money for plane tickets. Ah well, it's for the best since I won't be tempted to saying anything mean and nasty to any misbehaving relatives if I'm not there.

Christian Carnival

I've lost count of which one this is but the Christian Carnival is up at the Fringe.
Up date: It's number XV.

What was that about oil?

The enemy is not America
By Pamela Bone
Illustration:John Spooner

I am sent a newsletter from a women's rights group in Pakistan, which lists items from Pakistani newspapers. The following is a recent selection (I checked the items on the newspapers' websites):

Lahore: A girl, Kauser, 17, was strangled by her elder brother because she had married of her own will. She returned home and asked her family to forgive her but her brother strangled her with a piece of cloth. - The Daily Times.

Ghotki district: Two women were killed over Karo-Kari (honour killing). One Nihar Jatoi tied his wife to a bed and electrocuted her. One Bachal axed his wife Salma to death and fled. No arrests were reported. - The News.

Sargodha: A woman is in hospital after having both legs amputated because of severe injuries inflicted by her brother-in-law and mother-in-law, who clubbed her for her alleged illicit affairs. The woman, who was fighting for life, said the real reason was that her brother-in-law was trying to force her to arrange his marriage to her younger sister, but her sister had instead eloped with her paramour. - Dawn.

What chance of this woman becoming an international symbol, as has the boy who so tragically lost his arms during the invasion of Iraq?

Why is international public opinion not outraged at the treatment of women in Islamic fundamentalist societies? Why is it easier for millions of people around the world to see America as the great evil, rather than the countries in which governments ignore such horrific abuses of women?

via Instapundit.

Published

Parableman has a book review published in the upcoming issue of the journal Faith and Philosophy. He came home with his two complimentary copies last night. "It's only four pages," he says but I saw how much work went into those four pages (he's such a perfectionist). He has a link to the full text of the review here.

The Battle of Britain

I'm currently watching the 1969 film Battle of Britain. I keep waiting for the American pilots to show up and help kick some German Luftwaffe butt over London. The movie chronicles the events in Britain staring in 1940. Just to be sure about the ideas that were coming into my head I asked pookie Parableman for the exact year that the US entered WWII and some details about what Nazi Germany was up to prior to that. Imagine my surprise to hear that the US let Europe burn for so long before we finally hauled our butts into the conflict! No wonder they're still pissed! This isn't some anti-American screed I'm about to take off on. I am genuinely surprised that the US would let so much carnage go on for so long right under their noses. Being the one that the class bullies always picked on while others stood by and did nothing I am rather sensitive to these kinds of things.

On another note. My first observation about the film was that the characters in the movie seemed to react rather unemotionally to the initial German bombing raids. I can't help but wonder if this was really how people reacted to the German attacks or if it was a bit of dramatic license. It gives new meaning to the term "stiff upper lip" for me. My second observation was more about history and what could have been. The German people could have done such great things if they had had someone better than Hitler to lead them.

Update: According to the credits at the end of the movie 7 American pilots took part in the Battle of Britain. One was killed in action. I wonder how they ended up there before the US was officially in the war.

No rosaries allowed

Jim at Dappled Things doesn't have a comments feature on his blog so I'll have to comment on this here.

No Rosaries Allowed During Mass -- A lady from the parish was telling me tonight about one of her neighbors who, although she is Catholic, had started going to a Baptist church. Everything was fine until they told her (a) that she'd have to get rebaptized by full immersion and (b) that she'd have to stop saying her rosary during the services. She didn't like the first part, but it was the second part that was the straw that broke the camel's back. There's something delightful about imagining that fallen-away Catholic bringing her rosary beads to say during the Baptist "Mass" -- I guess she wasn't so fallen-away after all.

That is just so wrong! What is up with this obession with being dunked? I chose to be dunked when I made my public profession of faith as a kid because that was the way we did things at the church my family went to at the time. If we had been going to a church where sprinkling, rather than dunking, was the thing to do would that have taken away from my profession of Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour?

I don't understand the bit about the rosary either. Is it really so harmful that it can't be allowed in a Baptist church? I'm no expert in Catholic traditions (feel free to correct me if I am wrong) but I seem to have gotten the idea that the purpose of the rosary is to help people learn, remember, and meditate on bits of scripture and certain truths and ideas about God. I can't think of a better time or place to learn, remember, and meditate on God and scripture than during worship and fellowship with other believers.

Anyway, that just really irked me. I've seen far too many Christians express some really un-Christian attitudes (I think) towards their Catholic brethren and my annoyance finally bubbled to the surface.

No Sunshine

I found this poem over at Modular Parrrot. I think it describes well how bummed I feel everytime the sun goes behind a cloud (or everytime I think about taxes). During my first year in Syracuse (oh so long ago) I deduced the real reason that the Syracuse University mascot is an orange. It's because the sun so rarely comes out during the seemingly never ending winter that people need a reminder of what it looks like. I have no explanation for anything else that goes on in this state though.

April 14, 2004

I'm tired.
Tried of the long winter without sunshine.
Tired of the 20th year of a late NYS budget and no sunshine.
Tired of legislators that award themselves with a 14 day vacation while the icebergs are floating around and no sunshine.
Tired of hearing about a group of union teachers, after winning a $10B court suit to increase state aid, demand that the state(read you and I) pay them now and no sunshine.
Tired of having a state government that can't be changed due to restrictive voting rules and no sunshine.
Tired of reading about state elected officials and public employees committing crimes while employed by the government and not being summarily fired and tried and still no sunshine.
Tired of paying for school budgets that you have absolutely no control over when you vote it down and the contingency budget is the same or more than the defeated one and no sunshine.
Tired of watching the state/county/city/towns grub through the sewer for every one of your last pennies and then in rides the Lone Ranger Casino to add more sewage. And no sunshine.
Is the only light to be shown in this sad state going to be the flames of it being burned to the ground?

Pete Royle

Christian Carnival XIV

The carnies are over at Patriot Paradox. Check it out.

I'm back.

The weather's gone ugly again so I'm back indoors cuddling up to the computer for warmth and distraction from the dreary scene outside.

PBS is doing a series called America's Evangelicals. According to Army of One it's not the hack job that one would expect. Cool.

JD of Army of One has also been conducting interviews with bloggers from The Blogdom of God. The latest is an interview with La Shawn Barber. Good stuff.

Christian Carnival XIII

The carnival is up over at The God Blog.com. Parableman has a good summary of some of the post. I haven't had a chance to take a good look yet.

Them's fightin' words

”Selling Out” Liberalism’s Soul: Slavery Metaphors and the Political Left
"...while I don’t believe that racism is indicative of the political Left, I do find that some liberals have become afflicted with a tourette's-like reflex that causes them to resort to slavery-era metaphors, particularly the charge of Uncle Tomism.

What is most shocking about the use of these terms and images is the relatively nonchalant manner in which they are bandied about. The unstated premise is that they are simply stating a fact rather than tossing out a scurrilous epitaph. While its use by someone from the Right would be immediately construed as racially motivated, the same does not hold when the slur comes from the Left."

The comments are rather interesting as well. I've already been called "a rotten liar". Don't you just love intelligent debate with the opposition?

New Kid on the Block

Parableman's been telling me about Avery over at Stereo Describes My Scenario for awhile now. I'm finally getting around to linking to him. One of his latest posts is Say It Loud! It takes up where my post Black Heritage leaves off, or something like that. It's a good read.

Christians contend over Easter

Ambra at Nykola.com has a few words to say about Easter. She’s also invited a guest blogger to throw in his two cents on the subject. The main thrust of the two posts is that Christians should abandon their celebrations of Easter because of the holiday’s pagan origins.

The argument might hold true if what churches did on Easter Sunday was celebrate the pagan goddess that pagans worshiped. But for as long as I have lived, and as long as my parents have lived, and as long as their parents have lived Christians have celebrated the resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter not a pagan goddess.

Part of the argument against Easter is that is began as an integration of Persian and Germanic celebrations honoring a spring goddess. But, just as contact with the Persian culture influenced the Germanic culture so contact with Christian culture changed every culture it came into contact with. It is significant that we celebrate Easter according to the Jewish calendar. This is a clear indication that it has been pried loose from its pagan roots and grafted onto some Christian ones.

I think the greater concern is not that we celebrate Easter but how and why we celebrate it. Like other Christian holidays retailers seek to make money off of the pious telling them that they need to buy this that or the other in order to celebrate a holiday that should have nothing to do with material possessions. If you are a Christian Easter is not about that new pastel coloured outfit. It is not about that silly rabbit or about the brightly coloured eggs. I’m not saying that the usual Easter traditions need to be abandoned but they do need to be put in their proper place. Christ needs to be the emphasis of Easter for Christians everything else should run a distant second.

There's another interesting response to the argument that Christians shoudn't ccelebrate Easter here.

Black Heritage

As the debate continues over on Parableman’s blog over that racist Condi Rice poster I’ve been contemplating a few things. One of them is the claim that the descendants of Africans brought to the Americas as slaves have been stripped of their heritage. Time and again I have encountered the idea that today’s blacks have been somehow lessened because they can’t trace their family trees even as far as the slave ships their ancestors were dragged off of.

Some intrepid soul in my husband’s family traced their family tree all the way back to the May Flower. They also traced the family roots to some nobleman from North Umbria who left England and changed his name upon arrival in the colonies. There are various versions of the family name scattered through out the cemeteries of small towns of my husband’s home state dating back to the 1700s and 1600s. He has ancestors among the founding fathers of many of these towns.

I on the other hand can only get as far back as two or three generations before things get murky. Having emigrated away from the country of my birth doesn’t help any but I doubt I would have an easy time tracing my ancestry back very far even if I did go back to the old country to do research.

Now some people would suggest that I should feel some type of way, namely hurt, inferior or stripped of my heritage, because of this. But I don’t understand why. A lot of people had to have been born and had to die for any of us to be on this planet. Are you really any more or less of a person if you don’t know who a small fraction of those people were?

All I really know about my African ancestors is that some of them came to the Americas on slave ships and some of them were responsible for putting their brethren on those slave ships. I know even less about the various European ancestors thrown into the mix. I do know that they were all survivors because they survived long enough to reproduce enough people to produce me.

Blacks in the Americas have a new heritage born on the shores of the New World. To ignore it while pining over what was left behind in Africa generations ago is a dishonor to those who survived and thrived in the New World.

Wrapped up in this idea seems to be the false assumption that all blacks who settled in the Americas did so as slaves. As long as there have been free whites on American shores there have been free blacks. And no they did not live as second-class citizens. Those who met the requirements (of age, owned land, etc.) voted and held public office. These people were farmers, businessmen, and skilled tradesmen.

For much of American history there have been thriving black communities in the south and the north. When faced with a prejudiced society that said they could not participate they built their own society. Schools, businesses, property, they had it all. This is the heritage of blacks in America as much as slavery is.

There’s a lot more to the history of the black man in the Americas than modern blacks seem to know or care about.

"The greatest 'casualty call' in history."

Joe at Evangelical Outpost reflects on his new role as a Casualty Assistance Calls Officer informing families of fallen Marines of their loss. It made me all teary eyed but I managed to keep it together long enough to finish reading the whole thing.

Casualty Call: A Marine's Reflections on Good Friday
When a Marine is killed or seriously wounded, the duty of notifying the next of kin falls upon the Casualty Assistance Calls Officer (CACO). Normally the tasks of the CACO team (comprised of a senior NCO, a commissioned officer, and a chaplain) are carried out by the same people. But the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have increased the need for more CACO teams and so I’ve been added to the roster of those assigned the morbid duty. Since my unit is one of the few active duty commands in the state, we’ve been assigned a large swath of Texas and are responsible for notifications over an area that spans hundreds of miles. Normally a command can expect to make “casualty calls” a year; we made that many this week alone.
---
Over 2000 years ago, the greatest “casualty call” in history spread throughout a small Roman province in the Middle East. The news that the truest friend, the most beloved son, the gentlest teacher anyone had ever known had been crucified must have spread like wildfire through the land, sparking the most profound grief our universe has ever known. From this side of the calendar we can’t begin to comprehend the magnitude of loss that must have weighed on the hearts of Christ’s followers, family, and friends. We look backward on Good Friday, seeing it from the perspective of the glory that came on Sunday morning. But they saw only the darkness and pain, the loss of hope and bewilderment; they saw nothing but heartbreak.

My phone may ring later this evening. I may have to don my uniform and put on a stoic front. I may have to drive for hours only to take the longer journey up someone’s front steps. I may have to knock on the door and see the melting expression of a parent’s dawning realization of why I’m standing on their porch. I may have to face the grief and pain and sorrow of a family that has lost someone they loved.

But I can offer them hope and take comfort in knowing that the heartbreak won’t last. After all, I know how the story ends. It may only be Friday. But I know that Sunday’s coming soon.

Wal-Mart Wars

Found this post about the trouble Wal-Mart faces when trying to establish businesses in black communities. The Mulatto Advocate calls it, What was that I drank? Thanks to La Shawn for the link.

It's not like anyone else was falling over themselves in a rush to build there. Let's face facts. Businesses avoid black neighborhoods like the plague. Harsh statement? You bet. A little self examination might tell you why. Ask yourself why anyone would want to give you anything after the temper tantrums you threw in 1965 and 1992.

Wal-Mart said, "We trust you". Please don't be deluded, of course they want to make a buck; but the relationship is not a parasitic one. Wal-Mart would have made money from the community, but it also would have put money into the community in terms of sales tax dollars and wages. Would Wal-Mart have put some small businesses under? Maybe. The area where the store would have gone is not exactly rich in retail development, so it's doubtful that it would have hurt too many businesses.

Checking out the Rice testimony

I've been watching Condoleezza Rice testify before the September 11th Commission on C-SPAN all morning (the kids have been playing nicely with each other so I haven't missed much). At times I've found my heart pounding as this classy lady fends off the hostile questions of some of the members of the commission. I think she's doing well so far. We'll see how the rest of this unfolds and what the talking heads say about it afterwards.

Update at 11:16 AM EDT: Instapundit had this link to the script of responses to Dr. Rice's testimony posted at 7:24 AM (EDT I think). It's interesting that the Democrats on the commission seem so hostile in their questioning. They seem to be the ones that she most often has to fight with to finish answering the questions they ask her.

Parableman is commenting on Bob Kerrey's performance during Dr. Rice's testimony. I think he's been the worst of the lot so far.

Update 11:47 AM EDT: "I don't believe in beating dead horses but they are a bunch of lame ones running around. Let's see if we can't push them out the door." James Thompson, said prior to asking questions about Richard Clarke's claims during his testimony before the commission. Dr. Rice has been awfully nice to Clarke so far.

Christian Carnival XII

Once again the carnies are in town. Here's where to go to get the good stuff: ChristWeb. Enjoy!

Christian Carnival XII Plug

The next Christian Carnival will be hosted
at ChristWeb.

To enter is simple. First your post should be of a Christian nature, but
this does not exclude posts that are political (or otherwise) in nature
from a Christian point of view. Then do the following:

email Stephen at

mccaskil@mac-con.com

Provide the following:

Title of your Blog
URL of your Blog
Title of your post
URL linking to that post
Description of the Post

Cut off date is Tuesday by 8 PM EST

If you are reading this and are not a part of the Christian Carnival
mailing list please visit the following link and join up:

http://patriot-paradox.com/mailman/listinfo/christiancarnival_patriot-paradox.com

*Also if you wish to host the Carnival in coming weeks email me at carnivalhost@patriot-paradox.com *

All questions are welcome. Get your entry in asap!

So, what number are you?

I am an imaginary number 1i I don't really exist _

what number are you?

this quiz by orsa

Hee hee!

Nykola.com is running a caption contest for a photo of Michael Jackson and Al Sharpton. Go take a look and have a good laugh.

Saturday Stuff

It's Saturday, yea! I got to sleep in this morning, mostly because the kids were up late at a friend's house last night, so I didn't crawl out of bed until 8:20 AM. Been working on taxes all morning. I'm almost done. Now I'm taking a break so I don't go mad. I'm really lovin' those "tax cuts for the rich" that John Kerry (and other Democrats) keeps going on about. Who knew I was so rich? Keep your mits off of my "tax cut for the rich" Mr. Kerry. I wish New York state would pass some tax cuts for all of us working class "rich" people. At least I don't live in New York City any more though. They really squeeze every penny they can get out of come tax time down there.

Parableman's got an interesting discussion going at an old post on his blog. Some folks have apparently taken offense at his characterization of this portrayal of Condi Rice as racist.

Favourite comments: "Your comments in point 5 tell me that you probably don't know any black people, and if you do, you don't know them well, or know many of them, because it is such a generalization that it makes me wonder if YOU are racist."

And

"Jeremy, clearly you have at best, a 'laboratory' level of knowledge of african-american culture. Please take the time to make some black friends. Yes! Real black people! Not just the ones you have been seeing on MTV."

I take issue with the implication that we watch MTV. I thought about wading into the fray on my man's behalf but he's holding his own quite well so I'll just sit back and enjoy the show.

Can you be a Christian and a ...

Okay, so I've heard the question, "Can a Christian be a [insert political affiliation of choice]?" or some variation of it for the umpteenth time. And for the umpteenth time I have wanted to reach through the computer screen and attempt to do physical harm to the individual posing the question. I find so many things wrong with questions like this that I'm not sure where to begin.

First, let me say that I am a registered Republican. I voted Republican in the last presidential election and I intend to do so in the upcoming election. I am not so foolish as to believe that because I am a Christian and I vote Republican that all real Christians should also vote Republican. That's the first problem that I have with the question above. It assumes that all Christians should vote for one party or another.

There are some basic fundamentals that all Christians share. Political affiliation is not one of them. I find it rather insulting to reduce the validity of faith to whether or not you are in the right political party (pun intended). Any student of history can tell you that faith is corrupted when it becomes so linked with politics that to disagree with the ruling party is to have your faith questioned.

God is a sovereign, all-powerful God in control of all aspects of humanity, including American politics. I find people who are so heavily invested in a political party that they question the faith/sanity/humanity of their political opponents laughable. Why all of the fuss? In the end the individual that God has chosen for the job will have that job. They will succeed or fail according to what God has ordained. In the American political system the role of the Christian is to choose the individual that they think God has chosen for a particular role. The world will not end if I chose differently from you, and neither of us will go to hell for it.

Christians are called by God to submit to their leaders, even if they happen to be evil despots bent on wiping Christianity from the face of the earth (how many times that been tried and failed). As Americans we are in the somewhat unique position of being able to choose our leaders. We are the agents that God uses to choose leaders who will either honour or dishonour God. Makes things interesting doesn't it?