“Well, what did you think?”

August 22, 2011 Leave a comment

“Well, what did you think?”

 

“Well, what did you think?”

I’ve heard people ask,

As if a snide comeback,

Was up to love’s task.

 

“Reasons, all reasons.”

“We’re not by your side.”

“Our life has its reasons,”

They’d chortle and chide.

 

“With friends like these friends

I’ve learned to just say,

“I’ll continue along,

Get out of their way.”

 

“Well, what did you think?”

They won’t hear me ask,

I’m so far behind them,

I walk in their past.

 

© Sally Paradise, 2011, All Rights Reserved

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Atheism in Retreat

August 20, 2011 Leave a comment

  
William Lane Craig wants to debate atheists ( Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, etc) in the UK but there are NO takers:
 
*****
God Is Not Dead Yet
How current philosophers argue for his existence.
by William Lane Craig
 

You might think from the recent spate of atheist best-sellers that belief in God has become intellectually indefensible for thinking people today. But a look at these books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, among others, quickly reveals that the so-called New Atheism lacks intellectual muscle. It is blissfully ignorant of the revolution that has taken place in Anglo-American philosophy. It reflects the scientism of a bygone generation rather than the contemporary intellectual scene.

That generation’s cultural high point came on April 8, 1966, when Time magazine carried a lead story for which the cover was completely black except for three words emblazoned in bright red letters: “Is God Dead?” The story described the “death of God” movement, then current in American theology.

But to paraphrase Mark Twain, the news of God’s demise was premature. For at the same time theologians were writing God’s obituary, a new generation of young philosophers was rediscovering his vitality.

The complete article here:http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/july/13.22.html?paging=off

For more information: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/PageServer

Filed under Atheism, Christian character, Christianity, Science Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

CTRL-ALT-DELETE

August 19, 2011 Leave a comment

Have you ever been in a relationship with a controlling person?  If you have you will better understand what I am writing about below.

 A controlling person is often a perfectionist.  For whatever unsettling condition/s that occurred in their young lives their need for perfectionism is absolute.  These people must have everything perfectly in order and under control.  And, in doing so, these people will find fault with everything. It doesn’t matter how good things are.  They will find fault with it. Their common reproach:  This is good, and yet…”  

You have just broached the liberal/progressive mindset and the maniacal motivations behind Hope and Change and MSNBC’s Lean Forward campaign

 *****

Control is the modus operandi of the Democratic Party.  This party seeks to control the conversation, to control your words with its ersatz religion of political correctness, to control the amount of your take-home pay, to control the social milieu, to control your food intake, to control the air, the water, the earth, control the science of air, water and earth, to control energy, to control finances, to control the pretense of international involvement via undeclared military action, to control education through teachers unions and text-books, to control jobs through unions, to control guns – to control your life ad infinitum.  The Dems have myriads of tyrannies of control governed by their politicians in charge of their ‘kingdoms’.  These Dems inherently seek more power to control and more time in office doing more of the same – controlling you at your expense. And, they keep Black-Americans in ‘their’ place with social welfare programs.

Let’s look at some of this tightening of the noose around our necks:

Control the conversation:  Massachusetts Senator John Kerry and West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller are just two examples of those who would constrain the first amendment to only leftist thinkers. Remember Stalin and the Gulags? Remember Alexander Solzhenitsyn being imprisoned for his writing against the government? Students today only read the myopic screed The People’s History of the United States written by the communist Howard Zinn.  These students have no idea about real world and American history. Student neo-socialists will seek to repeat Stalin’s Russia, I have no doubt.

Control the social milieu:  homosexuality, the donkey’s behind of the Democratic Party symbol, demands that the homosexual life-style addiction be accepted and endorsed by everyone at every level, much like pot-heads who want pot legalized.  Homosexuality demands that our children be taught about this lifestyle.  It demands that our children’s text books be filled with homosexual lore and history. And, if you don’t agree with homosexuality it will shout out “Homophobe!” Americans have every reason to fear the degeneration of America because of homosexuality.

Control your food intake:  Think Michelle Obama; think Democratic thin lizzies wanting to stop McDonalds and other fast food restaurants from serving their product to you. They want to control your weight.

Control your take home pay:  Democrats want to tax, tax, tax, build a casino to lure your money away, tax, tax, build a casino, tax…

Control energy:  Cap and Trade (says it all)

Control your job through unions:  union leaders want to have command of your job.  Once someone joins a union they want you to donate, donate and donate to their ’cause’. They will then skim money from your collected donations.  Union bosses are greedier than the corporate industry they rail against. And, they know that you are eager to give over your rights to them in exchange for the pretense of collective bargaining. They play on people’s laziness, people’s lack of motivation and people’s lack of self-determination. They tell you that they have the leverage that you don’t have.  This is a lie, of course. You can work wherever you want whenever you want if your are determined to do so or you can create your own company/job. You are free but unions are control mongers.

Control finances: the Dodd-Frank Act equals control, control, control, blame, control, blame and control; the irony: co-author Barney Frank is the very one who brought upon us the financial crisis of 2008 with his oversight Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’ little or no money down mortgages for low-income people.

Control the pretense of international involvement via military action:  It is a well-known fact that presidents who have not had military experience go easily into war. And, when they go to war they strictly limit and control the military action which in turn never yields a resolution or a decision of surrender. Instead of decisive military action there is only the ‘controlled’ back and forth of military hokey-pokey wasting lives, money and time.

 Extreme control and droll sameness are necessary to create a manufactured utopia. Everyone has to be on the same page for the utopia to work. The elitist left, Progressive Democrats, think that they know what is best for you.  Their ivory tower professors lecture naive and un-historied students spewing out their idealist nonsense in hopes of producing more useful idiots for their cache of followers.  These same professors have no real life experience.  They are afraid to go out into the real world. (Except, of course,  for William Ayers, the domestic terrorist.  He has actual experience in domestic terror.)

  “Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business,” President Calvin Coolidge told journalists in March 1929.

Filed under Political Commentary, Politics Tagged with , , , ,

Allen West, Black America & Plantation Politics

August 18, 2011 Leave a comment

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Pretense, Part 2: The World Has Become a Jerry Springer Show

August 17, 2011 Leave a comment

The following short article was written six years ago.  Read it and take a look around today. What do you see?

Theodore Dalrymple
Law Isn’t Enough

City Journal, Autumn 2005

Recently in London a correspondent of a left-liberal Dutch newspaper interviewed me, a decent, civilized sort—one of us, in short. I am sure that he brought up his children to say please and thank you, probably in several languages.

He asked me why I had chosen recently to move from England to France. I said that I thought France was a decade or two behind Britain in cultural decline. It had maintained certain standards a little better than Britain—though, I added, I could see that it was heading in the same direction.

He asked me what evidence I had for my claim. Well, I replied, crime in France was approaching British levels; in some places, it was even worse, at least for serious crimes of violence.

Another straw in the wind was the rising number of tattooed and pierced young people on view, as well as tattoo and piercing parlors. Ten years ago, you hardly ever saw a tattooed person in France: now they are everywhere. The small and ancient town, solidly bourgeois, near where I live has such a parlor, purveying savage kitsch to young fools. Le Monde published a little while back a profile of the acclaimed French writer Ann Scott, whose work makes Baudelaire’s seem a bit like that of Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Scott has a large and prominent tattoo of a swallow on her neck. Critics claim that her latest book, describing heroin addiction and lesbian love, has a terrible beauty, as well as near-emetic properties.

The correspondent asked me: what was wrong with tattooing, if that was how people wanted to adorn themselves?

I asked him whether he would have himself tattooed—whether he would be happy if his teenaged children had themselves tattooed—and if not, why not? After all, if he would not like it, he must have some inner objection to tattooing.

True, he said, but tattooing was not illegal. And since even I, who deprecated it, did not think that it should be illegal, there was nothing further to say about it. If tattooing was legal, it was thus of no social, moral, or cultural significance.

I tried to point out some of the cultural meanings of the vogue for tattooing. First, it was aesthetically worse than worthless. Tattoos were always kitsch, implying not only the absence of taste but the presence of dishonest emotion.

Second, the vogue represented a desperate (and rather sad) attempt on a mass scale to achieve individuality and character by means of mere adornment, which implied both intellectual vacuity and unhealthy self-absorption.

And third, it represented mass downward cultural and social aspiration, since everyone understood that tattooing had a traditional association with low social class and, above all, with aggression and criminality. It was, in effect, a visible symbol of the greatest, though totally ersatz, virtue of our time: an inclusive unwillingness to make judgments of morality or value.

But the correspondent’s premise that the legality of an act was the sole criterion by which one could or should judge it chilled me. It is a sinister premise. It makes the legislature the complete arbiter of manners and morals, and thus accords to the state quasi-totalitarian powers without the state’s ever having claimed them. The state alone decides what we have or lack permission to do: we have to make no moral decisions for ourselves, for what we have legal permission to do is also, by definition, morally acceptable.

Even worse than the correspondent’s implicitly totalitarian assumption was his lack of awareness of how societies cohere, and how social existence becomes tolerable, let alone pleasant. After all, the law does not prohibit rudeness, boorishness, and an infinity of unpleasant habits. But it is clear that if, for example, the prevalence of boorishness increases, life in society becomes more filled with friction and danger.

What I found so odd about the correspondent were his perfect manners and refined tastes. But so little confidence did he have in the value of the things that he valued that he seemed indifferent to the mechanism of their disappearance or destruction. This is the way a civilization ends: not with a bang but a whimper.

 (Emphasis mine)

 From this article:

 http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_4_diarist.html

 THEODORE DALRYMPLE: Anthony (A.M.) Daniels (born 11 October 1949), who generally uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, is a British writer and retired prison doctor and psychiatrist

Filed under Conservatism, conservative, Culture, Current Events 2011, Human Interest, LGBT, Liberalism, THEODORE DALRYMPLE Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Pretense, Part 1: A Look at Evil, Pretense and Suffering

August 14, 2011 Leave a comment

In his book People of the Lie:  The Hope for Healing Human Evil, Dr. M. Scott Peck writes in the chapter The Encounter with Evil in Everyday Life that

 “The issue of naming (evil) is a theme of this work. It has already been touched on in diverse instances: science has failed to name evil as a subject for scrutiny; the name evil does not appear in the psychiatric lexicon; we have been reluctant to label specific individuals with the name evil; in their presence, therefore, we may experience a nameless dread or revulsion; yet the naming of evil is not without danger.

To name something correctly gives us a certain amount of power over it. Through its name we identify it.  We are powerless over a disease until we can accurately name it…The treatment begins with its diagnosis.  But is evil an illness? Many would not consider it so.  There are a number of reasons why one might be reluctant to classify evil as a disease.  Some are emotional. For instance, we are accustomed to feel pity and sympathy for those who are ill, but the emotions that evil invoke in us are anger and disgust, if not actual hate…

Beyond our emotional reactions, there are three rational reasons that make us hesitate to regard evil as an illness…I shall nonetheless take the position that evil should indeed be regarded as a mental illness.”

Dr. Peck goes on to discuss the three reasons. I will use summary quotes.

 “The first holds that people should not be considered ill unless they are suffering pain or disability – that there is no such thing as an illness without suffering….it is characteristic of the evil that, in their narcissism, they believe that there is nothing wrong with them, that they are psychologically perfect human specimens…For we realize that their inability to define themselves as ill in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is actually part of the illness itself…The use of the concept of emotional suffering to define disease is also faulty in several other respects. As I noted in The Road Less Traveled, it is often the most spiritually healthy and advanced among us who are called on to suffer in ways more agonizing than anything experienced by the more ordinary.  Great leaders, when wise and well, are likely to endure degrees of anguish unknown to the common man. Conversely, it is the unwillingness to suffer emotional pain that usually lies at the root of emotional illness.  Those who fully experience depression, doubt, confusion and despair may be infinitely more healthy than those who are generally certain, complacent and self satisfied.  The denial of suffering is, in fact, a better definition of illness than its acceptance.

The evil deny the suffering of their guilt – the painful awareness of their sin, inadequacy and imperfection – by casting their pain onto others through projection and scapegoating.  They themselves may not suffer, but those around them do.  They cause suffering.  The evil create for those under their dominion a miniature sick society.”…

 Finally, who is to say what the evil suffer? It is consistently true that the evil do not appear to suffer deeply.  Because they cannot admit to weakness or imperfection in themselves, they must appear this way.  They must appear to themselves to be continually on top of things, continually in command.  Their narcissism demands it…

Think of the psychic energy required for the continued maintenance of the pretense so characteristic of the evil!…”

“I said that there are two other reasons one might hesitate to label evil as an illness…One is the notion that someone who is ill must be a victim….One way or another, to some extent, all these people (the evil) and a host of others victimize themselves. Their motives, failures and choices are deeply and intimately involved in the creation of their injuries and diseases….

The final argument against labeling evil an illness is the belief that evil is a seemingly untreatable condition…It is the central proposition of this book that evil can and should be subjected to scientific scrutiny…It would, I believe, be quite appropriate to classify evil people as constituting a specific variant of the narcissistic personality disorder.”

Dr. Peck goes on to describe this variant of personality disorder:

“In addition to the abrogation of responsibility that characterizes all personality disorders, this one would specifically be distinguished by:

(a)    consistent destructive, scapegoating behavior, which may often be quite subtle.

(b)    excessive, albeit usually covert, intolerance to criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury.

(c)    Pronounced concern with a public injury and self-image of respectability, contributing to a stability of life-style but also to pretentiousness and denial of hateful feelings or vengeful motives.

(d)   Intellectual deviousness, with an increased likelihood of a mild schizophrenic-like disturbance of thinking at time of stress.

…

But there is another vital reason to correctly name evil:  the healing of its victims.”

 *****************

 I have encountered some distinctly evil people during my life.  The common characteristic of their personality is the veneer of pretense with which they surround their lives.  They see themselves in a role, a grandiose, high-minded role.  There is nothing within themselves or outside themselves that will keep them from holding that image up before themselves or others. They will deny, blame and ignore what every one else can clearly see.  Their motivation, as Dr. Peck describes in the above chapter, is fear. 

Jesus said, “If the light in you is darkness how great is that darkness.”

Jesus’ perfect love can cast out fear…and evil.

Filed under Christian character, Christianity, Evil, Suffering Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Toe the Line with Women & Our National Budget

August 13, 2011 Leave a comment

Filed under Political Commentary, Politics Tagged with ,

The “No Class” Class Warfare of Obama

August 12, 2011 Leave a comment

Just the facts, ma’am, from the Tax Foundation:

The President’s notions are not, however, grounded in fact. Let’s review the data on individual taxpayers first:

  • Recently released IRS data for 2009, shows that taxpayers earning over $200,000 paid 50 percent of the $866 billion in total income taxes paid that year, or $434 billion. Skeptics will say, “That’s because they earn the majority of the income inAmerica. Not so. These taxpayers earned 25 percent of the $7.6 trillion in total adjusted gross income in the country that year.
  • The 2009 IRS data also shows that a record 58.6 million tax filers had no income tax liability that year. This means that 42 percent of the 140 million Americans who filed tax returns that year contributed nothing to the basic cost of government.
  • Millions of people received cash “refunds” in 2009 even though they paid no income taxes: Some 21 million nonpayers received $27.5 billion in refundable credits from the child credit; Obama’s Making Work Pay program gave out $12.8 billion in refundable credits to 32 million filers; The Earned Income Tax Credit program doled out $54 billion in refundable credits to 24.9 million filers; and, nearly 5 million filers received $3.9 billion in refundable Education Credits and roughly 1 million filers got $4.65 billion in refundable credits under the First Time Homebuyers credit program.

The data also shows that the corporate tax burden is extremely progressive as well.

  • In 2008, the roughly 1,900 largest corporations paid $152 billion in income taxes. This amounted to 67 percent of the $227 billion in total corporate income taxes paid that year.

Obama repeated statements that the wealthy and corporations are not paying their fair share of taxes are simply false. The facts show that the very taxpayers Obama wants to raise taxes on are already paying more than their fair share of taxes and that the majority of Americans are getting the benefits of government spending while contributing next to nothing to its basic cost. That is a recipe for fiscal and social instability. (emphasis mine)

from:  http://www.taxfoundation.org/blog/show/27530.html

*****

My tax returns leave no doubt that I am paying a large amount of taxes. Ergo, I am effectively supporting many who are not paying taxes.  They receive the benefits of what I am paying for.

https://sallyparadise.wordpress.com/2010/09/14/this-shall-not-pass/

“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”    Thomas Jefferson

Filed under Economics, Political Commentary, Politics Tagged with , , , , , ,

Fifty Ways to Leave Your President (Obama version)

August 11, 2011 Leave a comment

The problem is all inside your head
She said to me
The answer is easy if you
Take it logically
I’d like to help you in your struggle
To be free
There must be fifty ways
To leave your President

She said it’s really not my habit
To intrude
Furthermore, I hope my meaning
Won’t be lost or misconstrued
But I’ll repeat myself
At the risk of being crude
There must be fifty ways
To leave your President
Fifty ways to leave your President

[CHORUS:]
You Just slip out the back, Jack
Make a new plan, Stan
You don’t need to be coy, Roy
Just get yourself free
Hop on the bus, Gus
You don’t need to discuss much
Just drop off the key, Lee
And get yourself free

She said it grieves me so
To see you in such pain
I wish there was something I could do
To make you smile again
I said I appreciate that
And would you please explain
About the fifty ways

She said why don’t we both
Just sleep on it tonight
And I believe in the morning
You’ll begin to see the light
And then she kissed me
And I realized she probably was right
There must be fifty ways
To leave your President
Fifty ways to leave your President.

h/t to Paul Simon.

Filed under Political Commentary, Politics, Progressivism Tagged with , ,

Déjà vu All Over Again

August 10, 2011 Leave a comment

Remember the “Recovery Summer” of 2010?

“Vice President Joe Biden today will kick off the Obama administration’s “Recovery Summer,” a six-week-long push designed to highlight the jobs accompanying a surge in stimulus-funded projects to improve highways, parks, drinking water and other public works.

David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president, said: “This summer will be the most active Recovery Act season yet, with thousands of highly-visible road, bridge, water and other infrastructure projects breaking ground across the country, giving the American people a first-hand look at the Recovery Act in their own backyards and making it crystal clear what the cost would have been of doing nothing.” “

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/38654.html

 Obama should really get to “feel our pain” during his upcoming 2011 Pass the Buck/ force majeure /”WE’RE NOT EVEN HALFWAY THERE YET”/”Money for nothing and our chicks for free” bus tour: he should be fired immediately.

During this tour you will learn about Obama’s management style:  managing uncertainty with more uncertainty.

This is like deja vu all over again.” –  Yogi Berra

Filed under Current Events 2011, Economics, Political Commentary, Politics Tagged with , , , , ,

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