The crew of a North Korean cargo ship, with US Navy help, fights off pirates after an attackl off Somalia.

22:31 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

The mind boggles ...

A court commissioner granted Britney Spears three monitored visits a week with her two small sons while ordering the pop star to childproof her house and work out a schedule for the visits with her ex-husband, Kevin Federline, according to a ruling made Tuesday.

22:28 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

Twenty eight years ago today, I was privileged to attend my future bride's birthday celebration (her 25th) for the first time. We married the following May, and following a tumultuous 7 year ride got divorced. I remarried (twice) and launched a computer career, she went to nursing school and our kids grew up, sometimes under her rooftree, sometimes under mine. We swore eternal enmity, and collectively spent vast sums with attorneys to make one another's life miserable. It never really worked out the way we wanted it to, though, and we never seemed quite able to completely sever the link.

Finally, a little over a year ago, we realized that love and hate are horns on the same goat. We had basically wasted some twenty years on detours and dead ends, and decided it was time to give us the shot we deserved all those years ago once more.

A triskelion (pictured here) is a Celtic emblem of the eternal, and it seems ever so apropos today, because to be true a love must be eternal. And ours is proving itself so, quite improbably, and despite two decades putting forth our collective best efforts to sabotage and abrogate it.

So today it is my privilege to attend again my once and future bride's birthday celebration, this time her 53rd. This time I even got to bake the cake!

Happy Birthday, sweet Lorraine! Let the party carry on ...

21:06 /Home | 6 comments | permanent link

We lost a lamb Friday night to predators. Either dogs or coyotes - not sure which, but it was an ugly thing. It was the first time since we ramped up the farm that I've lost a large animal this way, and it sure accelerated our fencing projects. We now have two of our main paddocks refenced and secured, both done since Saturday, and I'm just about exhausted.

As a side benefit of our increased vigilence, I've killed three opossums in the past two days. That has already had a slight impact on egg production, and I strongly suspect these critters oft have feasted on some of my missing hens as well. We'll see.

21:52 /Home | 3 comments | permanent link

While perusing the feeds this morning, I happened across a review of Barbara Victor's The Last Crusade: Religion and the Politics of Misdirection over at Bartholomew's Notes on Religion. The review gave a tantalizing hint of the take that some contemporary evangelical Christians have on circumcision - something I had little suspected, and had to find a web reference to confirm:

On March 14th, 1994, Hayford spoke at a regional Promise Keepers conference in Anaheim, California. During his message, Hayford gave three reasons why God required circumcision in the Old Testament:

[l] God wants to touch your very identity as a man. [2] He wants to reach out and touch your secret and private parts. [3] God wants to touch man's creative parts.

Apparently Rev. Hayford is considered a pretty much mainstream Pentecostal (if there is such a thing), and I would be reasonably certain that he shares the classic disdain for homosexuality shared by classic Christianity, seeing as how he counseled Ted Haggard after his "fall". How can he not see the contradiction here? If a man wants to touch another man's "secret and private parts", Hayford would no doubt condemn him. If a man wanted to cut the end off another man's secret and private parts, I'm sure that Hayford would be appalled and wish the offender jailed. But Hayford's god doesn't follow these rules - it's not only OK for him to apparently harbor homosexual urges, it's justified and, in fact, required!

This is what can happen when you have the divine utterly cut off from the universe and existing outside of it: the "creator/created" dichotomy. Heathen deities are part and parcel of the fabric of the universe itself, and are generally expected to follow the same "rules" and suffer the same consequences for their violation as the rest of the world. While we have no proscription of homosexuality per se, Odin is sometimes castigated in Heathen circles for his alleged ergi (unmanly, sexually receptive) practice of magic, and some go so far as to say that these actions on his part contribute to his ultimate downfall at the Ragnarok.

We expect the same standards from our deities as we expect from each other, no matter where we stand on the great issues of the day. And we expect our deities attitudes and behaviors to change over time, and not to be ever unchanging, or changing on mere whim.

This is why it's so hard to pin a contradiction on a heathen: we are broad as well as deep, and have no need to justify the continuation of ancient practices beyond our own preference in practice.

If Odin showed up and wanted to touch my secret and private parts, I'd tell him to piss off... and still call myself a heathen in the morning!

08:27 /Asatru | 2 comments | permanent link

Heck of a job, Harvey!

The US Federal Emergency Management Administration says sorry for having employees pose as reporters.

21:27 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

These people better watch out, or they just might convince backers of Dr. Paul that they are not, in fact, Republicans. In which case they probably won't vote Republican. And the purpose of any political party in a democracy is, after all, to garner votes, isn't it?

By these peoples standards Robert A Taft wasn't a Republican, either, and Barry Goldwater's disaffection with the Religious Right would've made him suspect as well.

I especially liked Brad Spangler's comment on the situation:

As a revolutionary anarchist, it is not without a sense of irony that I note that todays Republican Party best serves my ends of permanently discrediting all governments everywhere. Only Ron Paul stands in my way. Thanks, RedState!

I guess he originally posted it to the ResState site, and it was taken down almost immediately. Go figure. They probably thought he was shilling for Paul.

Idiots.

RedState.com says newcomers to the site cannot supporters of the internet's favorite candidate, claiming rabid Ron Paul fans aren't real Republicans.

06:45 /Politics | 1 comment | permanent link

The "zero tolerance" policy we should be protesting is the one that apparently bans any semblance of rationality from school administrators.

A South Carolina high school freshman has been expelled from school for possession of a butter knife.

(link) [ABC News]

via Overlawyered

06:29 /Politics | 3 comments | permanent link

If all it took to cast doubt on the spurious notion of "creationism" was an examination of animal breeding, these folks could've saved themselves a lot of time and trouble by asking any farmer. Not only is this a Study in Stupidity, but it's one with a sensation seeking headline to boot.

Come to think of it, a lot of these studies have headlines like that.

The St. Bernard dog -- named after the 11th century priest Bernard of Menthon -- may have ironically challenged the theory of creationism, say scientists.

06:24 /Home | 3 comments | permanent link

It's a sure sign of our times to call these incidents "excrement-related bio-cleanups".

Administrators and the school paper wax philosophical on why students can't keep their pants on.

19:37 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

Coming soon to a Nanny State near you ...

A government advisor has suggested that the problem of Brits continuing to smoke themselves to death might be tackled by requiring nicotine addicts to obtain a £200 annual licence, the Telegraph reports.

19:34 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

I thought this was more of El Reg poking some fun, and was going to put in in 'Humor', where it belongs. But it's for real. The IMF really is floating proposals for special taxes on engineers, and more or less compulsory arts degrees.

Which in my mind just proves Albert Einstein's dictum that "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has limits."

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has this month brought out its World Economic Outlook for 2007, and the various heavyweights of financial news have all had their bash at reporting on it. Normally, no vulture would stir on his/her perch over this type of thing - unless, perhaps, Paris Hilton had been implicated in some kind of major economic upthrust - but in this case, the economists make some rather startling pronouncements about technology.

06:55 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Ya know, Oral, maybe you've been spending too much time in the prayer tower lately, 'cause it ain't the devil that's trying to steal ORU , it's your money-grubbing boy and his cougar bride...

AP - Oral Roberts returned to his namesake university Monday and denied the lurid accusations that have threatened to engulf the school, telling students and employees in a chapel service that "the devil is not going to steal ORU."

06:47 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link