Fareed Zakaria on America’s political system.
“We have lost the ability to [accept] any short term pain for long term gain. […] We have become fat, and dumb, and happy, and arrogant. […] Just as this world is opening up, we are closing down.”
Month: August 2008
Two Projects
First major project of this weekend: the deck.
Before:
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After cleaning and sanding:
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Second major project: recovering from installing Windows XP Service Pack 3. “Within hours of its release, Microsoft’s Service Pack 3 for Windows XP began drawing hundreds of complaints from users who claim the update is wreaking havoc on their PCs” I later discovered (source). That was in May, and apparently it’s still not fixed.
A half-project of taking our Jetta in for a flat tire fix provides a striking contrast. “Imagine if everyone provided service like that,” I said to K. “We’d go to pick up our car and find someone in the shop had opened the hood and taken a sledgehammer to the engine: it would look the same, but would never work again.”
Yet another mind-numbing example of the “mystery” of the Microsoft monopoly: crappy products that rule the world.
Dupont Forest
Dupont Forest is one of those places K has wanted to go for a long time, but time and circumstance prevented us. School, exams, life…we only last week made it to the state park.
Most notable: waterfalls.
It’s a short drive from our place, but it seems like a different world. Cool mountain air, wonderful views — the perfect Sunday outing.
We weren’t the only ones to think that.
At the top of the enormous rock down which kids were sliding was a covered bridge — I swear it looked bigger from the bottom of the falls.
The Girl didn’t seem to mind, though.
God of Gas
Effective use of knee time.
Forget Congress. Forget President Bush. About four months ago, frustrated by the apparently immutable laws of supply and demand, Rocky Twyman turned to a higher authority in his quest for cheaper gasoline.
The recent dip in prices, he says, is proof of divine intervention.
“Prayer is the answer to every problem in life,” said Twyman, founder of the Pray at the Pump movement, whose members huddle around gas pumps and ask the Almighty to lower gasoline prices.
Group gives thanks to the Lord — for lower gasoline prices – Los Angeles Times
Satanic Verses 2
This content is private.
Talking
The Girl has been talking more and more, though the developments are slow. She is, after all, learning two languages. She mainly favors English, but she does use a few Polish words, and as any child her age, she has some of her own inventions:
Polish Words
- dać
- uwaga
- tam
English Words
- hug
- socks
- shoe
- milk
- baby
- juice
- hot
- wet
- help
- more
- dog
- pizza
- down
L-isms
- “Ba-ba” is banana.
- “Moo-Moo” is her favorite cheese, aptly named as there’s a drawing of a cow on the package.
- “Meow!” is cat.
- “Shhhh” is sleep.
- “Sha-sha” is outside.
The budding bilingualism can lead to amusement.
When K went to pick L up from daycare, L’s now-good friend, J, helped L gather her things. It’s a daily occurrence, usually looking for “Baby.” L, however, has become particularly fond of a little teddy bear (“miÅ›” in Polish) and that’s her daily companion.
K entered the room and immediately J, helpful as always, began running around the room, looking for the teddy bear, saying, “Misio! Misio!” And so our daughter is only 19 months old and already a language teacher.
On the way out, K told L she should say goodbye to the frog on the door mat.
“Powiedz ‘bye’ żabie,” K suggested.
“Bye, frog!” L responded.
Resources
We often hear schools’ complaints about the lack of this or that resource. I always assumed that was because of lacking something more fundamental: money.
I found out yesterday how wrong that simplistic thinking could be.
My wife brought me a computer from her office some time ago. “It doesn’t have any memory,” she said, “And there’s no operating system installed, but maybe you can use it.”
Can I use it? Of course I can use it. No teacher complains about having too many computers for his students.
The plan was simple: at the beginning of the year, I would take some of the funding I get from the state for supplies, buy a half-gig of memory, load some form of Linux on it, and I’d have a new computer for my room.
In talking to a fellow teacher, though, I learned that it might not be so simple. I went to our school’s IT guy for clarification.
Short answer: sure, I can use it, but no student can touch it.
It seems we have a contract with a particular computer manufacturer that stipulates two things:
- Each computer for student use must be purchased through through Distributor X. That rules out using my computer.
- Each computer for student use must be running Windows XP. That rules out the closet full of laptops I discovered we have, sitting unused because they have Windows 2000 on them.
Now, it seems to me that if Computer Manufacturer X was really interested in educating students that they wouldn’t really care whether or not we use other computers or use other operating systems. It seems that teachers wouldn’t be punished for taking some initiative to get more materials for students.
But underlying that would be a mistaken understanding of the nature of the capitolistic drive, wouldn’t it?
Busy
School is starting up again. I’ve been moved to a new room, which means reorganization. I’m teaching new courses, including English I Honors — a high school class taught in eighth grade. Translation: bright, motivated students. Additionally, I’m coaching the girls’ volleyball team this year. And I’m going through my formal evaluation this year.
In other words, no time. For this, or anything else.
Ideas abound; time doesn’t.
Mark of the Beast
What’s going on here?
West Virginia started Friday keeping driver’s license photos out of a computer database for members of a small religious group who believe digital storage is a “mark of the beast” that evokes biblical prophecy.
State Division of Motor Vehicles Commissioner Joseph Cicchirillo said the group of about 50 or 60 Christians, who are not affiliated with a particular church, contacted the agency two or three years ago to object to their pictures “being on a database that can be exchanged throughout the world or hacked into.” […]
Without this accommodation, group members wouldn’t get their driver’s licenses, which the commissioner said would hamper their ability to get everyday services from insurance coverage to check cashing.
I’m all for religious accommodation, but this is a bit ridiculous. This “Mark of the Beast” nonsense is not a theological point, like the Sabbath. Its appearance in the Bible is so vague that it could be interpreted many ways. “I don’t want to clock in — it’s the mark of the beast.”
Indeed, the story includes something just that bizarre:
One of the group members is Phil Hudok, who made headlines in 1999 when he was fired as a Randolph County school teacher for refusing to require his students to wear bar-coded identification badges. Hudok was later reinstated after a circuit judge said the school board had made no attempt to accommodate his religious beliefs.
How exactly was the school to accommodate these beliefs?
And just how insane do religious beliefs have to be in order for some one to say, “That’s too much.”
Can a racist who bases his racism on twisting passages of the Bible refuse to work with a black man because it offends his beliefs? Can a Muslim refuse to work with a woman because it offends his religious beliefs?
The State should accommodate religious beliefs when it doesn’t include re-inventing a whole data management system for a few individuals (as is the case with the article above) and when the belief is not some fringe belief held by a handful of paranoid idiots.
This and That
Hania Chowaniec-Rybka was well known before she was famous. A singer who specializes muzyka goralska (the music the music of Podhale, the region spread beneath the Tatra Mountains), Hania had made a name for herself long before she was known outside the relatively small confines of Podhale.
Her album “i to, i to” (“This and That”) is a blend of jazz and muzyka goralska. When K told me about it and suggested we buy it, I cringed. Mixing goralski music with this or that genre is nothing new, but it’s seldom done well.
With this album, however, sometimes one style or the other stands out, but never at the sacrifice of the other. It’s music with integrity, in other words. So often, bands that mix Highlander music with anything else create nothing but a travesty, a mix in which bastardized forms of one music plays slave to the other. Sometimes it’s rock with a bit of muzyka goralska , but mostly its the goralska music that dominates. Or at least tries. Instead of sounding like a clever marriage it ends up like a bad date.
Hania’s mix of jazz and the styles of the Polish Highlanders bends both genres just enough to make an accommodating mix.
Here’s my favorite track from the album: “Ola boga.”
| Jo se jes dzieweczka Mam wesolo dusze Bez dzien moge robic Wieczor tanczyc musze. | I’m just a little girl with a happy soul I can do without the day but I must dance at night |
| Ola boga swietego Co to komu do tego Ola boga swietego A kapela gra | Oh dear God, it’s nobody’s business! Oh dear God, and the band’s playing! |
(Polish speakers: How would you have translated “Ola boga swietego” in this case? Nothing sounds right.)
“Worst organised Polish company”
scatts at Polandian has a horror story that sounds all too familiar to me.
My vote has to be given to the dearly beloved Telekomunikacja Polska S.A. or just TP as they prefer to be called these days. Admittedly, Poczta Polska provides tough competition for my vote with a strong performance in number of packages lost, sourpuss sales ladies and in worst queues, but my recent experience in trying to get Neostrada in the new home proves that it is going to take truly world-class incompetence levels for anyone to take the top slot away from TP.
(And the Polandian award for worst organised Polish company goes to… « Polandian).
While I never had to deal with TP (appropriate acronym), I did have a similar experience getting official state permission to marry K.
Polish bureaucracies have an obsession with exact documentation. And stamps.
Exposing a Fantasy
The Illuminati. Who would be better to expose this fantasy than the one and only Bill Schnoebelen? Bill
was a Satanic and Voodoo High Priest, 2nd degree Church of Satan, New Age guru, occultist, channeler, 90th degree Mason, Knight Templar, and a member of the Illuminati.
A lot of titles. Sounds like someone who’s been searching.
Bill’s got a great story. He was born a Catholic, but like all good Catholics, he eventually became a Satanist. A Wiccan. A Mason. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Bill got interested in the occult because some professor in his seminary — oh, he was going to be a priest — said that, in order to become more like Christ, seminarians should study what Christ studied: the occult, because Jesus was really nothing more than a magician. Rather, someone who practiced Magick.
Odd seminary professor, that.
Eventually Bill fell into the Wicca movement and then progressed on to Satanism, and his career in the Church of Satan was going quite well until it came time for him to become a Satanic priest. Why? Bill explains for us that, before he could become a satanic priest, he had to become a Catholic priest.
That’s news.
So he found a priest willing to ordain him in return for an ordination as a witch something-or-other.
A priest can simply ordain someone else a priest? I thought that’s something a bishop would have to do. Maybe I’m just getting too hung up on the details.
At some point in his walk down the dark road, crosses over the abyss or some similar formulation. What that means, Schnoebelen explains, is that he stands above good and evil. He is a god, and all other humans are like little more than cattle.
At this point, he was told that “to move through what is called eight degree” one has to make choice: either study Lycanthropy or vampirism. He says, “I knew a couple of werewolves and I learned from them, and it’s rather a painful process.”
Not being one who likes pain, he chose vampirism.
How’d that go?
I was made to drink the blood of what I now believe to be a fallen angel, and he in turn drank my blood, and by doing that, something happened to my blood and I was actually physiologically transformed in many subtle ways. My blood type changed. It became impossible for me to eat[ …] except blood. The only solid food I consumed was the Catholic communion host.
Next time I’m at Mass with my wife, I guess I’ll have a hard time suppressing the knowledge that a good many of the parishioners could simply be vampires looking for — what? I’m not sure.
Where did Bill get the blood? By this time he had around 160 witches under them, and many of them more more than willing to let him bite into their jugular — literally. At least that’s what he says.
It got so bad, he says, that he literally had urges to jump on prostitutes, rip their throats out, and drain their bodies. What kept him from doing that? He really loved his wife, and he knew getting caught doing something like this could shatter their marriage.
But didn’t he view all other humans as beneath him — little more than animals? Why would he care about his wife anymore?
The story continues that Bill got back from the bank one of the checks he’d sent to the Church of Satan, and a bank teller had written on the check that she would be praying for Bill.
Within a day or two, I lost all my magical power. I lost all my vampiric power. I lost my job. I got sick as a dog. My wife even got sick.
Bill did what any self-respecting vampire would do. He cried out to Lucifer for a sign.
Who showed up?
Mormon missionaries!
I’d been told many years earlier by this grand druid fellow down in Arkansas, that if I ever got in really deep spiritual trouble, what I needed to do was join the Mormon church, because the Mormon church had been started by witches, for witches, for the express purpose of giving people a place for people like me [sic] to hide out and appear to be nice, conservative, white-bread, Republican Christians.
So the Catholic host is all the solid food a vampire needs and Joseph Smith was a witch.
Who knew?
I couldn’t make it any further. Half an hour had yielded so much, well, crap:Wicca, Mormonism, Catholicism, Satanism, and Masonry, all united in an unholy conspiracy to rule the world. It’s all within the first half hour of “Exposing the Illuminati from Within.”
Bill has other videos available, including a nine-hour special Interview with an Ex-Vampire (Google Video). A few minutes of this reveals stories of battles with demons that leave physical marks, a Wicca ceremony to call up a demon that results in the conjurer being whisked immediately to hell before Bill’s very eyes (at the very least, the guy disappears), of casting spells that result in people’s deaths, and numerous other fantastic (as in “fantasy”) stories.
One has to ask, though, what’s going on here. Is this guy delusional? Did he simply spend a lot of his youth searching for a spiritual home and now that he’s a born-again Christian, he embellishes his life’s story — for the greater good? Is he simply lying? He has to be, because look at what he’s saying: All your childhood fears of beasts under the bed, of werewolves and vampires, of withes casting death-spells, combined with all the urban legends you’ve ever heard, are true — and Wicca, Mormonism, Catholicism, Satanism, and Masonry (one and the same, really) are all behind it.
Who can take this stuff seriously?
Three Shots of a Developing Girl
