Paultastic Musings

I've been frustrated that the tsunami, awful tragedy that it was, has been used as a springboard for more attacks on the United States. This editorial from the New York Post resonates with me.

THE political and ideological exploitation of perhaps the worst natural disaster in all our lifetimes is almost beyond belief — were it not for the fact that nothing these days is beyond belief.

Even as tears spring into the most hard-hearted person's eyes at both the unimaginable scope of the tragedy and at the wrenching individual stories of loss, opinion leaders just can't help themselves.

They are using this cataclysm as little more than cheap debate fodder about the nature and character of the United States, its president and its citizens.

Don't misunderstand.

It is fine and proper to have a debate and discussion about the degree of generosity the United States could, should and must show in the wake of this literally earth-shaking event.

But at this moment, the United States is not the issue.

The foreign-aid budget of the United States is not the issue.

Our government should not be the focal point of the discussion right now.

Don't we owe the dead, dying and injured the minimal grace not to convert their suffering into a chat-show segment — the latest left-right clash over the Bush presidency?

And couldn't the editorialists at The New York Times have forborne — even just for a week — making use of the tsunami to complain about U.S. government spending on "development aid"?

Development aid is the blanket term for American grant money handed out to other countries, supposedly to help their economies grow. Development aid has nothing — nothing — to do with what has happened.

The aid at issue now is disaster relief.

Secretary of State Colin Powell found himself in the position of having to remind the world that over the past four years the United States has provided more such aid than all other nations on the planet combined.

It is appalling that he had to mention this, and that President Bush was compelled to cite the same information on Wednesday, because you're not supposed to brag about how charitable you are. But once a United Nations official decried the American aid pledge as "stingy," the administration had little choice.

Any rational person would have understood without having to be told what the president told the world on Wednesday morning, which is that the $35 million pledge "is only the beginning of our help."

But maybe people are looking for a sideshow to distract them from the sickening pictures and the keening cries of the untold numbers of mothers whose babies were swept away.

Editorial by John Podhoretz, and it originally appeared at http://www.nypost.com/commentary/37436.htm.

It looks like I'll be able to study Biblical Hebrew starting in January under the venerable Dr. Vern Steiner. It's an intensive class designed to cover a year's worth of material in five months. I'm apprehensive, but excited at the same time. :)

The Hebrew Bible...No I can't read the cover...yet.

A few years ago some friends of mine were doing some work of some sort, like moving boxes or something. My roommate stops helping and asks for a pen and a piece of paper and goes into the other room. A while later (after the work was done) he comes out of the room and tells us that God was speaking to him and that he needed to write it all down.

This is a modern conception in the church, and Aaron Shafovaloff writes about this in his blog, Grace and peace to you where he quotes from another blog's commenter, who quotes from James Boice's What Makes a Church Evangelical?:

“Not long ago one of my staff gave me a script to be used for an imagined ‘evangelical hotline,’ the kind of recorded message one might hear when he or she calls a participating church for psychiatric help. It went like this:

If you are obsessive-compulsive, please press 1 repeatedly. If you are codependent, please ask someone else to press 2. If you have multiple personalities, please press 3, 4, 5, and 6. If you are paranoid, we know who you are and what you want. Just stay on the line so we can trace the call. If you are an evangelical, listen carefully and a little voice will tell you which number to press.

Is that how we are to find guidance for our lives from God? A little voice? Not at all. That is a kind of mysticism. ‘I prayed about it, and God told me to do the following.’ In former days a statement like that would have been followed by a more mature believer asking for chapter and verse, meaning, where do you find that in Scripture? We need to get rid of that way of talking and those false claims entirely.

God has given us all the guidance we need in the Bible. So if there is something we want or think we need that is not in the Bible—what job shall I take? where shall I live? Whom shall I marry?—after having prayed for God’s providential guidance, we are free to do whatever seems best to us, knowing that God, who cares for us always, will certainly keep us on his path. It does not matter what specific action we take as long as we are obeying God and trying to live a godly life.

That does not mean God does not have a plan for our lives in all these areas. He does. He has a detailed plan for all things, having foreordained ‘whatsoever comes to pass,’ as the Westminster Confession of Faith has it. But it does mean that we do not have to know this plan in advance and, indeed, cannot. What we can know and need to know is what God has told us in the Bible” (24-25).

I think I've found one of my new favorite websites. It's called The Holy Observer and it's satire ranks up there with the Onion. The target of its clever jokes? Christians. Am I offended? No way. This is well-written, witty, and well-placed satire that we need to hear. Some of my favorite articles so far (I've just started browsing the site):

Top 10 Youth Group Activities

Survey: 91% of Christian Rock Bands Sport 'The Mac'

Shutdown Season: Willow Creek Community Church Will Close its Doors for the Summer

Darwinists Strike Again In Ichthus Fish Car Emblem Battle

Church Sign of the Month From the Holy Observer

Now remember, Christians, it's satire. Don't believe everything you read on the site--most likely it is fake. There's a stereotype that evangelicals are particularly gullible when it comes to things on the Internet, and I think the criticism has some merit. There was a guy that read an article on the Holy Observer that claimed Saddam was saved, now he was wearing a "My Boss is a Jewish Carpenter" shirt around his prison compound. That guy then went to his church prayer meeting, announcing Saddam's salvation.

So, please read the site with the proper attitude. You'll enjoy it much more, and who knows, some of your flaws may be pointed out to you.

Visit The Holy Observer's Website

Oh so I'm dumb, I guess.

The condescending attitude of the left toward those of us who voted for Bush is humorous. Fortunately we know better, as Mark Steyn points out:

A COUPLE of weeks ago, Michael Moore was touring the US offering unregistered voters incentives such as free "clean underwear" in return for a promise that they would show up at the polls. I'm not sure whose underwear he was giving away - his own or someone else's - but, if it was the former, the grateful recipients evidently accepted a pair, went and camped out in them up in the Rockies, and forgot to return to town for election day.
...
According to Moore, there are hardly any conservatives in the US, but they do a great job of persuading all the progressives to stay away from the polling booths by putting obstacles in their path, like not giving them free underwear. So the long queues reported at polls were assumed by the media to be proof of that big pro-John Kerry youth vote we always hear about.

--The Australian: Mark Steyn

On Novemer 8, the Northern Lights we're going nuts over Nebraska. It was a rare time to see this natural beauty. I've only seen them once in my life, in Minnesota and I was amazed. In my near-20 years of living here I've never seen them. Here's what they looked like:

Northern Lights over the Missori River in Blair

You can view more great photos at Extreme Instability. He's also a storm chaser, and has some amazing photos of tornadoes and storm cells, located at http://www.extremeinstability.com/my_chase_accounts.htm. Here's one of many cool pictures:

Tornado

I appreciate the civil tone Grant Holzhauer used in his latest response to me. I ask both (one of them is me) of my blog readers to read it here. My response is below, and I will refrain from using derogatory comments about his Bush: Razorblade Suitcase leanings...as any Nirvana fan knows, Bush is merely a copycat of the Seattle threesome. :)

Read more! »

I recently posted on a Catholic's blog, located at http://www.humanae-vitae.com/. The blog's owner, Grant, followed the link to my homepage and found my short article on the canon here. He posted a response to the article on his blog, which can be found here. Okay, enough background? Good. :) Here we go...

Read more! »

On October 15, Rocky Mountain News broke the story about a Colorado Democratic playbook being leaked to the press. A quick glance revealed the sinister side of the political left. It advised the party faithful to launch a "pre-emptive strike" alleging voter intimidation whether it existed or not. Read the article here.

Surprised?

I'm not surprised in the slightest. We've already seen this sort of attitude from the liberals. This year, however, seems much worse than it has been in the past. Never have I seen this level of childish vitriol from an election, ever:

• Bush-Cheney Washington Headquarters Broken Into
• 3 computers stolen from Bush's Bellevue campaign office
• Cincinnati Bush-Cheney Headquarters Broken Into
• Protestors Ransack Bush/Cheney Headquarters In Orlando
• Shots fired at Knoxville Bush-Cheney office; no one hurt
• Florida man tried to run down controversial Republican
• Woman Arrested For Stealing Bush Signs

I could post more about sign-stealing, violence, flash mobs, but you get the point. The left is the party that sinks to new lows every election.

Business As Usual For the Left

A writer for Slate magazine had an experiment. He posed as a flaming liberal in Republican country (Orange County, CA and Bakersfield, CA) and then posed as a hardcore conservative in the liberal areas of California. His findings? In the red (conservative) areas, people really didn't care about his overt leftism. But when he visited the blue (liberal) areas, he was called names, given looks of hatred, and he almost made a little girl cry! You should read the article here:

Political Poseur: Pretending to be a Republican in Blue California.

So who intimidates whom?

The case is closed. Sure, there are some bad apple conservatives that say mean things to lefties. But these are isolated incidents that aren't even reported because they are tame compared to the infantile and violent tactics employed by the lefties. Ah, the Democrats...the party that loves to point out voter intimidation and disenfranchisement...but only if Democrats aren't affected by it. Where's the outrage at these bullies?

Aren't double standards fun?

Kerry recently courted the conservative voters in Ohio--a state crucial to his election--by "bagging a goose."

Democratic Presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., returns from a goose hunting trip

Okay, this is ridiculous. Who in the world are you trying to fool?

We know you are one of the most liberal senators, if not the most liberal. We know your stance on gun control, so save the facade. We don't buy it.

And for telling us recently that you are guided by your faith and you will take it with you to the White House to continue guiding you...please stop it. You sound like Howard Dean when he tried the same trick--telling us his favorite book in the New Testament was Job.* We could tell Dean was a phony, and we can tell you are too.

By the way, the liberals jump all over Bush for his faith and having it "guide him" in the White House (something Bush has never said). Where are the liberals crying foul about your newfound spirituality? Oh, that's right. They're not crying foul because they know you're playing to the Christian conservatives--you didn't really mean it, did ya?

The liberals know that you're a phony too. ;)

*Job is in the Old Testament.

I stumbled upon an amazing testimony written by an amazing woman who runs the "Proverbial Wife" blog. She had a very difficult first nine years, you'd have to read the testimony to understand.

Got to see a lot of people this weekend.

We invited Pete and Hallie Maudlin over on Friday night. It was great to see this krazy zany couple. After dinner we played Clue and Trivial Pursuit. Melinda's brother Luke also participated in the mix and made up some mean garlic toast to go with the lasagna. All in all, the evening was a success, except Jonah threw up. :(

Saturday afternoon my sister and her husband Mike made the jaunt from Lincoln to hang out with the Olivers. I got to update their computer, we watched some home improvement shows and caught up with each other's lives. It was good to visit. I pointed Mike to the SelectSmart Presidential Selector which told him what he suspected: Bush was his ideal candidate. He then proceeded on to the Religion selector and Protestant Denomination Selector. At first it told him that he was a Mormon or Jehovah's Witness. After tweaking some answers it revealed his Protestant/Assemblies of God leanings. :)

My parents and brothers showed up around 6 PM that night so that we could celebrate Michelle's impending birthday. Jonah wasn't feeling too hot, so Melinda stayed home with him while the rest of us made a visit to Old Chicago. There was much rejoicing.

That night we played some Guesstures to a dead tie after five rounds. I didn't even know that was possible! Sadly Jonah threw up. :(

Jake and Josh also vied for top spot on SSX 3--it's a snowboarding game. Jake won the title, but because of Josh's size (now he's bigger than his older brother) Jake conceded victory to Josh.

This was an action packed weekend. Full of shenanigans and tomfoolery.

My friend Mark let me in on a cool party trick.

1. Offer someone a stick of "Big Red" gum. (It has to be Big Red for this to work).



2. After they stick the gum in their mouth, have them lightly lick the entire inside of the wrapper (not the silver side, the sugar side). Don't lick it too much, just enough for it to stick to your forehead.



3. Stick the wrapper on your forehead.



4. Wait

After a short while it will start burning, increasingly. Which surprises the heck out of the unsuspecting forehead gum person. ;)

It's fun for the whole family.

I don't have a lot of time to write, but I'm now blogging with a much fancier tool, called b2evolution. This will allow for RSS feeds and comments, which I'm sure will not interest anyone.

Had my Fantasy Football draft tonight...all in all I thought I did all right. I got Daunte Culpeper, so that's a plus!

Jonah's still cute. He likes to spin in a circle and get himself dizzy, and he likes to play his own version of "Follow the Leader" where he is the leader, and basically he lays down and stands up in one place. When mommy and daddy copy him he can barely contain himself he's laughing so hard.

What's with Muslims? Why do so few of them condemn their fellow Muslims when Islam supposedly means "Peace?" Luckily there are some who do criticize their comrades, but they are drowned out by the fanaticists. This school seizure in Russia makes me sick to my stomach. What animals! To go in and take over a school filled with children?

Muslim terrorists aren't too great at taking on a military, but when it comes to killing women and children, they can really shine.

Five Years.

It flies by so fast. I can't believe I've been married to Melinda (a wonderful, beautiful person, by the way) for five whole years.

I remember riding in the car with my new bride to the reception hall, both of us practicing the phrases "I love you wife" and "I love you husband." Now it sounds completely odd to say the phrase "my girlfriend." The concept of a girlfriend is so immature to me. No offense all you boyfriends out there who have girlfriends.

I suppose I should put down some things I've learned in the last half decade. As a wise sage of relationships, I would let you all down if I didn't tell you the secret of a strong marriage (sarcasm flag raised).

I am a poor husband, but I'm trying to improve. I'm not really the guy to give advice. But I will give this little tidbit: remember the great traits your wife has, you know, the ones you bragged about to your buddies before you got engaged. The ones you listed when you tried to convince your parents you weren't rash when you decided to propose. These traits are still there, but we become used to them in time. And this is the sad truth of relationships. But if you can remind yourself, several times a day preferably, that you married a beautiful, outgoing, smart, funny woman (you can fill in the traits of your honey here) you won't get too upset over stupid things that cause arguments. Like the proper way to mount a roll of toilet paper.

Tryin' to keep it real,

Paul

Jonah’s cast has been off for a little over a week, and now he’s gaining the confidence to walk around the house more. His vocabulary has improved a bit, too. Yesterday he started saying "apple" (well, more like aaaahhhhhba), and he calls water "doo-du," which consequently, also happens to be Uncle Luke’s name.

He also used the training toilet the last few days. Apparently Melinda was trying to get him ready for his bath and had him sitting on her lap, naked. Jonah has always been one to take advantage of such a situation, and so he proceeds to urinate (I mean, why not?). My quick-thinking wife grabs Jonah and puts him on the toddler’s toilet not a second too soon—-and Jonah finished his duty on the little throne.

Now he’s used it three or four times since then. Of course, mommy needs to put him on there with his diaper off, but Jonah takes care of the rest. And he claps every time he finishes.

The joy of fatherhood. :)

Jonah slipped on the basement floor a while back and twisted his leg. He let out quite a scream afterward. We could tell it was tender, but we couldn't figure out what the problem was. We took him to the doctor, we iced his knee, we had no idea where the pain was.

Well, after a week of carrying him around the house, we took him to his pediatrician. She recommended some more X-Rays, and then we found the problem: little tiny fractures in his right leg, just above the ankle. It's common enough to have a name: "Toddler's Fracture."

Well, Jonah now has a cast on his right leg--it's blue and it makes him look almost cute in a sad way. But he gets all kinds of attention from it.

Jonah has taken to it pretty well. He can even kind of walk on it...sort of like a wobbly hobble with a thump thump quick step from furniture piece to furniture piece. He's pretty fast at crawling with it, too.

The good news is: the cast comes off tomorrow. So rejoice everywhere! Jonah will be walking tomorrow.

The laminate has been lain in my basement. What a great feeling. Now we just have to put up the finishing touches (like trim) and put our furniture back where it belongs. Oh, and um, put some drywall up where our utility room door used to be...Melinda moved the door. And she did a good job too, if you ask me.

Jonah is so close to walking it's not even funny. I know I've been saying this for months, but well, you know how that goes. He can walk between Melinda and I with no problems. He just doesn't have the confidence to do it when we are there to catch him. How allegorical.

And more on the Jonah front, he's starting to talk a bit, too, although I'm not really sure he knows all that he's saying. For example, when I come home from work, and he hears the garage door opening, he says "Da da! Da da!" which warms my heart, believe you me. But, when I was watching him Monday night, I had him on my lap when the garage door opened (Melinda was coming home from teaching night school). Jonah starts yelling "Da da! Da da!" Whoops, the issue of gender is iffy with Jonah right now. He also says "Mama", "Baby" (to the baby-sun thing on Teletubbies) and says "Uh" when he shakes his head, like "Jonah, want to come with Daddy to bed?" Jonah responds with a head shake and says "Uhh."

But the cutest thing Jonah is doing right now is learning animal sounds. If you ask Jonah what a puppy says, Jonah whimpers out a high-pitched "wooffff wooffff" while nodding his head. And up until two weeks ago, that was his answer for any animal. Example: Jonah, what does a duck say? Jonah: woofff woooffff. But now Jonah can answer the question with the following animals:

Now, granted these are my best attempts at imitating him, and he doesn't nail the animals each time, but it's getting closer. It's probably because our son is the smartest child alive in the history of humans.

I've been getting into a phase where I now can look objectively at the music of yesteryear. When I was in High School I couldn't stand Elton John, Willy Nelson, Simon & Garfunkel, because they weren't Nirvana. Now I'm bored, more or less, with modern rock and so I can now "rediscover" the music that brought us here. Using online MP3 sites I've been able to legally buy individual songs and enjoy them. Some of my favorites have been Willy Nelson's "Always on my Mind," Simon & Garfunkel's "Sound of Silence," "Cecilia," and "Mrs. Robinson", and Elton John's "Bennie and the Jets," "Tiny Dancer," and "Your Song." Good stuff. I'm glad I've been able to get over the prejudices of my youth and enjoy some great music.

And, I have to give some recommendations to two songs that have moved me lately. Ben Folds' "Still Fighting It" has a great theme about growing older and the constant cycle that everyone finds themselves in. Even more deep is the song's focus on the relationship between a father and son, which causes me to re-evaluate my relationship with my father and to help me remember what's important as I spend time with my son. The other song that moved me is Johnny Cash's remake of "Hurt," previously done by Nine Inch Nails. The video is so poignant but the song is still able to get the song across. The song is pure genious and when sung by Cash it becomes a brilliant masterpiece. The message is clear--this world fades away, and the stuff we are most proud of is worthless when we are knocking on death's door. Cash died Sept. 12, 2003, making the song's message all the more striking.

Risk Night XX was held on Saturday, five guys showed up to experience world domination. We played with mission cards, but you wouldn't know it by how long it took us to play. It turned out to be a three hour-long game. If we weren't using mission cards, it would have been a fortnight before we'd be done. Newcomer Dan Proffer came away with the "W."

It's Spring and people I am excited. Jonah is turning out to be some type of outdoorsman and gets all excited when someone takes him out the door. He squeals with delight as he gets to "walk" (with mom or dad's fingers to hold onto) on the grass. And his favorite thing is the slide in the backyard. He could go down that thing for hours.

He had his one-year checkup last week. Usually, the rule of thumb is that you can take someone's height at age 2, double it, and then you have a rough idea for how tall the person will be when they are older. Well, the doctor informs us, Jonah will be 5 foot 7 if we double his current height--and he's only one! So if Jonah skipped growing this entire year, he'd still be on task to be above average height.

My good friend Donnie had a baby last weekend. Well, Donnie didn't, but his wife Darcey did. You can see pictures of the beautiful Abigail Therese Hill here.

Still working on the basement. We're finishing up the painting before we put down flooring. I'm also looking at possibly buying a miter saw with which to cut boards and stuff.

Well, that's it for now. See you all next time!

We still have about 25-30 inches of snow on the ground from the onslaught God has given us. Jake has had 4 snow days already this year with the possibility of more down the road. We broke several records with this snowfall, even snagging the highly-coveted "Most snow in the month of February" record! We were about an inch away from the "Most snow on the ground--ever" record! A lot of shoveling, that's all I can say.

Jonah's going to be one year old next month. I'm amazed at how fast he is growing--and how time flies. It seems that just yesterday I was jumping at the phone whenever it rang because it may be Melinda telling me that she was going into labor. Now I have this cute little guy at home clapping when people clap on TV and imitating us when we do a sheep sound for the Barney Farm Animal book. I'm getting older faster and faster, and my son is no longer a newborn--he's becoming a toddler in no time flat. What a short life we lead.

I'm still drywalling my basement. Well, to be technical, I'm mudding the drywall in my basement. It's a difficult thing to do--it's hard to get it to look right. I'm learning though--but I'm on application seven or eight and it feels like I've been doing the same task forever. I'd like to just finish up so I can start painting the basement. And then lay down some laminate. It will be so nice to get that done.

What is this world coming to? It seems that every month there's is a new controversy to drive this country farther and farther from God. Take this gay-marriage thing in San Francisco and Massasetts for example. As I watch and read coverage of this horrible change of events I can't help but notice the incredibly slanted reports. The Yahoo slideshow had 86 slides--I only saw three that featured a pro-family advocate. The rest showed people holding up gay flags proudly, tried to focus on a "mob" of people--to give the impression that gay-marriage advocates were in the clear majority (they're not). It even focused on young children of gay parents writing letters to the senator who proposed the gay marriage ban. I mean, come on! Is there a quota this month for pseudo-emotional appeal to sympathy news photos? And please, you don't have to portray every person who opposes gay marriage as an ultra-religious zealot who prays, cries, and blows up people. Many of us are thinking people who are frightened by the redefinition marriage--a definition that has remained constant for thousands of years.

The best picture in the slideshow was a gay-marriage activist yelling at a guy holding up a sign that said, "I Want to Marry My Dog." People may brush the point aside, but they'll miss the cogency of the simple words on the sign. If we can redefine marriage because enough people want it--what's to say that we can't say that a dad can marry his daughter? Or a man his uncle? Or a teacher her young student? Or a man his dog? If the definition of marriage is so fluid, so changing, how can we say the above examples are wrong if both parties involved are willing?

Anymore, these days, all one needs to do to get something so vile allowed by society is to go on TV and start a movement--get people to start thinking about your repugnant cause. I could go on TV tonight and propose that we should be able to kill any infant if he has any birth defect whatsoever, like Peter Singer says. From what I see in this world--it will only be a matter of time before society embraces such an abhorrent, hideous perspective.

Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?