Local Costs of the Iraq War

Follow this link to see the breakdown of the cost of the Iraq War for various towns, cities and counties across the U.S. This breakdown is based upon a total cost of $251 billion. Bear in mind this is just through FY2006.

Unlinked to the Future

The End of Courtship: Part 2 of 3 by Leon R. Kass.

Thanks to technology, a woman could declare herself free from the teleological meaning of her sexuality — as free as a man appears to be from his. Her menstrual cycle, since puberty a regular reminder of her natural maternal destiny, is now anovulatory and directed instead by her will and her medications, serving goals only of pleasure and convenience, enjoyable without apparent risk to personal health and safety. Woman on the pill is thus not only freed from the practical risk of pregnancy; she has, wittingly or not, begun to redefine the meaning of her own womanliness. Her sexuality unlinked to procreation, its exercise no longer needs to be concerned with the character of her partner and whether he is suitable to be the father and co-rearer of her yet-to-be-born children. Female sexuality becomes, like male, unlinked to the future. The new woman's anthem: Girls just want to have fun. Ironically, but absolutely predictably, the chemicals devised to assist in family planning keep many a potential family from forming, at least with a proper matrimonial beginning.

See also The End of Courtship: Part 1 of 3

Avian Flu Wiki

The Flu Wiki is a collection of resources on influenza and coping with an influenza pandemic.

Lone Star Statements

"The Mourning News" has reprinted a bunch of single-star Amazon reviews of books from Time’s list of the 100 best novels from 1923 to the present. They are a scream! A few of my favorites:

The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Author: J.D. Salinger

“So many other good books…don’t waste your time on this one. J.D. Salinger went into hiding because he was embarrassed.”

The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)
Author: William Styron

“My great-great-grandfather is not gay! I don’t know why this William Styron is trying to lie on my great-great-grandfather. Needless to say I am a descendant of Nat Turner and it bothers me that this author is trying to lie to make this book more interesting. I cannot say for certainty that my grandfather was not gay or that he didn’t like white women and neither can this author but I can say that Nat Turner was married and had children and I am a descendant of that union! Other than that idiotic portrayal the book was good.”

The Great Gatsby (1925)
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

“It grieves me deeply that we Americans should take as our classic a book that is no more than a lengthy description of the doings of fops.”

Lord of the Flies (1955)
Author: William Golding

“I am obsessed with Survivor, so I thought it would be fun. WRONG!!! It is incredibly boring and disgusting. I was very much disturbed when I found young children killing each other. I think that anyone with a conscience would agree with me.”

Thank you to Marginal Revolution for the link.

Apples, Pumpkins, and Devolution

I spent this weekend processing a pumpkin we bought from the farmer's market. Actually, Biscuit and I brought home two—one for me to cook with, and one to carve. We also bought a peck of apples, because she loves apples. She loves to eat them, she loves to talk about them ("Apple!" is her favorite word), and she loves to bang them together while eating them and talking about them.

We have yet to carve the big pumpkin. It has been sitting on the dining room table, all shiny and orange. Biscuit, who just turned two, is still convinced that it is one REALLY big apple. "Apple!" she exclaims proudly, as she sneaks onto the table to get at the bowl of fruit. Against better judgment I ignore that she isn't supposed to be on the table. Just this once. Again. "Apple," she says, as she points at the bowl of shiny red orbs. I encourage her, yes, they are apples. "Apple," she says, kissing the big orange pumpkin. No, I have to say, my heart melting, that is a pumpkin. She laughs and pats the pumpkin, as if she is patting my addlepated noggin. Of course it's an apple. Silly mommy. All the world's an apple to eat and bang together.

I haven't ever tried to make pumpkin puree before. I read several how-to guides on the Internet, but it still took me about two hours to cook the two halves to a desired consistency. I finally gave up and microwaved them. I won't be doing that again.

It also took me forever to puree the pumpkin flesh. I finally gave up and added water to make the puree smooth enough to actually mix in the food processor. Nowhere have I read that it is OK to add water, so I think I flunked that part of "Fall Homemaking 101." However, I did emerge with about 12 cups of pumpkin puree, which is delightful.

My first attempt at baking with the puree was to make pumpkin bread. I was happy to read that one can make pumpkin pie spice easily using ingredients already at hand. At least, I thought they were at hand. I had ginger, allspice, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg, all good stuff, from the Baker's Catalog. Well, all have gone MIA since the move. However, I am pleased to report that I substituted Chinese Five Spice and cinnamon and the result was quite nice. My husband, who is quite picky, proclaimed it edible. Huzzah!

Next, I made muffins, using the same recipe. I was able to locate the turbinado sugar for the muffin tops, and the results were gorgeous! I still have about 6 cups of puree left (in the fridge, natch—what, me freeze?). I am now looking for a recipe that will use pumpkin puree and apple sauce (from all the banged up apples).

While I was slaving over the hot food processor, Biscuit and I listened to The Proclaimer's 1988 album, Sunshine on Leith:

What do you do
Wnen democracy fails you
What do you do
When the rest can't see it's true?

Pat votes the Scots away
Just like her mother
But South always takes all
Just like her brother
The next time she might vote
So might the others
But time's running out pal
Cause they're giving up in numbers

What do you do
When democracy fails you
What do you do
When minority means you?
--"What Do You Do?"

This weekend I hope we can go apple picking. The critter will be in Heaven, and I will have more baking materials. I am really fond of baking right now because it keeps the house warm and it has been FREEZING. We have been putting plastic up on the windows and weather stripping the doors, but there is only so much you can do when it is 30 degrees outside. Brrr…

The People’s Cube takes on Cafepress and wins!

You really should read the whole thing, but I am partial to the letter The People’s Cube (PC) sent to Cafepress regarding the removal of PC’s graphic "Cafepress is a left-wing nutjob:"

Courts have upheld that privately owned shopping malls are "Public Commons" where people have free speech rights no matter what the policies of the owners of the shopping malls. Web-sites such as CafePress, it could be argued, by allowing in the public, are Public Commons and as such don't have the right to limit anyone's free speech which includes, but not limited to, setting up a section named "Cafepress is a left-wing nutjob."

While the very concept of "Public Commons" is a purely leftist idea used by the Left to survive by parasitizing on capitalism through injecting communist propagandistic larvae into the host bodies of wealth-creating capitalists (which I guess has unfortunately happened to Cafepress at some point), I consider it a fair game to invoke this concept while fighting the Leftist infection itself.

While the "Cafepress is a left-wing nutjob" site merchandise is still banished into ether, PC’s "Che™ is dead" shirts have miraculously been restored! Now, if they only sold coffee cups...

Via relapsed catholic

Phone-tree Hell

I always make phone calls mid-morning, after I have had my coffee and before I have had a change to get involved in anything else. It requires getting into the right psychological frame of mind, girding up one's loins in preparation to do battle with that frustrating post-modern beast, the Integrated Voice Response (IVR) system that almost all companies throw in front of their customer service reps in hopes that you, the customer, will give in and hang up before actually encountering a human being.

Well, gentle readers, the customer strikes back! Here is a "cheat sheet" which gives you the proper way to bypass the phone menu trees of most major companies. Many times pressing "0" works, but not always. Read more about this volunteer-supported database here. Enjoy!

Thanks to Gene Ex for the link.

"The common people swarm like summer flies

And whither fly the gnats but to the sun?"

Great New Post from Bedlam Nation

So we are told in this story courtesy of NewsMax that sex between male and female soldiers is rampant in today’s politically correct up-to-date armed forces. Furthermore, this conduct is “the cost of doing business in the gender-integrated military.” And all because the “policy makers believe that men and women are interchangeable.”

One female soldier said sex is “what people this age do.”

Yes, naturally. But one of the chief functions of civilization is to channel this natural God-given impulse into its proper, life-giving path. At an age when they should be marrying and having children these young people are stationed in a foreign country “fighting” an unnecessary and ill-conceived war because we refuse to see who the real enemy is and to face what must be done.

...

Why has it come to this? It seems to me more and more that the proper functions of humankind have been utterly ignored in the quest for things that are abominable anyway. An army fighting for the right to enjoy sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll and abortion is not going to have any real motivation compared to a people engaged in a struggle to be able to reproduce and provide a future for itself and its children.

The Mothering Mentality

"In the minds of many, the government should be well-oiled and ready, eager and full of verve, even before the disaster has stopped. Food should appear like magic, water flow from the hills, and new homes built silently in the night, as if by charitable elves. When this naturally does not occur, the result is, above all, a complete escape from reality. The government is incompetent, the rest of the world is ignoring our plight, no one cares about us, The Leader is racist, misogynist, anti-poor, a capitalist, a Christian, eats meat, and therefore is corrupt and evil and contains within him the power to in fact create such catastrophes to eradicate those that see him for what he really is.

...

"It was once easy to dismiss this as the mad rhetoric of third-world asshats, anti-West in toto and usually crushed by local animals who spent their aid money (the only Western product they enjoyed) on weapons and palaces instead of food and water. After Katrina, this isn’t so easy anymore..."

Read More at Dust My Broom. Thanks to relapsed catholic for the link. Vote for her, she's funny!

Happy Birthday, Johannah Faith Duggar!

Michelle Duggar just delivered her 16th child, and she's already thinking about doing it again.

Johannah Faith Duggar was born at 6:30 a.m. Tuesday and weighed 7 pounds, 6.5 ounces.

Read More.

Student Rebuked for Sitting During Mexican Anthem

In Illinois, a 17 year-old high school student was reprimanded when he declined to stand for the Mexican National Anthem during a school ceremony.

Of the 2,550 students enrolled at Larkin last year, 38.4 percent were Latino. Nearly a quarter of students were new to English. Information for the current school year is not yet available.

Four years earlier, 20 percent of the school’s 2,029 students were Latino, according to the 2000 school report card. Some 10 percent of students spoke English as a second language.

As the school grows more diverse, cultural assemblies will follow, Bedard said. But they should take care to represent a range of cultures, including the homegrown one.

“If they have an assembly, I would be happy if they will not try to force students to honor patriotic elements of another culture unless they also honor our flag, our anthem as well,” Bedard said. “It’s just respect for both cultures.”

No kids please, we're selfish

Childless at 48, I'm now old enough for the question of motherhood to have become merely philosophical. Still, I've had all the time in the world to have babies. I am married. I've been in perfect reproductive health. I could have afforded children, financially. I just didn't want them. They are untidy; they would have messed up my flat. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned too much time away from the writing of my precious books.

From the Guardian on September 17 via American Renaissance.

This essay, surprisingly frank and self-aware, lays it all on the table, covering falling European birth rates and what it means for sustained European culture. The author continues:

Yet maybe the multiculturalism debate is sufficiently matured for us to concede that white folk are people, too. We encourage minorities of every stripe to be proud of their heritage - Jamaicans, Muslims, Jews - as well they should be. We don't assume that if an immigrant from China cherishes his roots and still makes a mean moo shoo pork he is therefore bigoted toward every other ethnicity on the planet. So can Italians not champion Italianness? Or the British their Yorkshire pudding? Indeed, the tacit consensus - that every minority from Australian aboriginals to Romany should be treasuring, preserving and promulgating their culture, while white Europeans should not - is producing a virulent, sometimes poisonous rightwing backlash across the continent, and a gathering opposition to the immigration that Europe sorely needs if it is to maintain itself economically. In the interest of civil, rational thinking on this matter, we should at least allow ourselves to talk about it. The long-dominant populations in most of Europe are contracting, and maybe by the time they're minorities in their own countries they will have rights, too - among them at least the right to feel a little sad.

We are living in the eye of a great big storm, one that will only fully be appreciated by our children as they try to write the history of their nation. The paradigm has irrevocably shifted, and even baby-boomers who have never before questioned any of their petty assumptions and motivations can smell the rain a'comin'.

"What they didn't steal they trashed..."

"They took everything — all the electronics, the food, the bikes," said John Stonaker, a Wal-Mart security officer. "People left their old clothes on the floor when they took new ones. The only thing left are the country-and-western CDs. You can still get a Shania Twain album."

Read More...

Joy!

Google is now offering a blog search service at http://blogsearch.google.com/.

From the FAQ:

Blog Search is Google search technology focused on blogs. Google is a strong believer in the self-publishing phenomenon represented by blogging, and we hope Blog Search will help our users to explore the blogging universe more effectively, and perhaps inspire many to join the revolution themselves. Whether you're looking for Harry Potter reviews, political commentary, summer salad recipes or anything else, Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice.

Your results include all blogs, not just those published through Blogger; our blog index is continually updated, so you'll always get the most accurate and up-to-date results; and you can search not just for blogs written in English, but in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and other languages as well.

If you read this, you will go insane...

The New Century Foundation has updated The Color of Crime for 2005. Those of you who are inclined to commit mayhem when confronted with facts should avert your eyes. The rest of us can safely read and analyze mountains of U.S. Department of Justice data in adult fashion. Really. I have faith in you.

Read Jared Taylor's press release at VDare.com, as well, and make up your own mind. As to the anonymous poster who chastised me below for linking to Jared Taylor and American Renaissance, I think Taylor's words speak well to the situation:

It is a sorry day in America when you are either brave or racist if you dig up and publicize crime data the Department of Justice has been collecting for decades.

Disgrace

Purely by happenstance (not due to the events which unfolded 24 hours later in New Orleans), I purchased J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace from Amazon on the 28th of last month, and it arrived Friday. I finished it at 6 a.m. yesterday morning. At 224 pages, it is a fast read, but the book lingers long after it is put down.

Just as Nabokov wasn’t much interested in the political implications of child molestation when he wrote Lolita and was instead using Humbert Humbert’s tawdry obsession as a vehicle to explore the English language, Coetzee, too, seems to use the strife of post-apartheid South Africa as a literary device. Any sentiment Coetzee the author may have towards the country he has since fled is well-hidden. I won’t even attempt to engage in any lit crit here, since others have done it much better than I could ever achieve.

Whatever the author’s feelings towards black-ruled South Africa, he is too good an observer to refrain from describing the brutalities of that land. His novel ends with the utter debasement of his protagonist, David Lurie, an erstwhile college professor who finds at the end his only redemption is by making sure that the dog corpses he is in charge of incinerating are not debased:

It would be simpler to cart the bags to the incinerator immediately after the session and leave them there for the incinerator crew to dispose of. But that would mean leaving them on the dump with the rest of the weekend's scourings: with waste from the hospital wards, carrion scooped up at the roadside, maleodorous refuse from the tannery - a mixture both casual and terrible. He is not prepared to inflict such dishonor upon them.

So on Sunday evenings he brings the bags to the farm in the back of Lucy's kombi, parks them overnight, and on Monday mornings drives them to the hospital grounds. There he himself loads them, one at a time, on to the feeder trolley, cranks the mechanism that hauls the trolley through the steel gate into the flames, pulls the lever to empty it of its contents, and cranks it back, while the workmen whose job this normally is stand by and watch.

On his first Monday he left it to them to do the incinerating. Rigor mortis had stiffened the corpses overnight. The dead legs caught in the bars of the trolley, and when the trolley came back from its trip to the furnace, the dog would as often as not come riding back too, blackened and grinning, smelling of singed fur, its plastic covering burnt away. After a while the workmen began to beat the bags with the backs of their shovels before loading them, to break the rigid limbs. It was then that he intervened and took over the job himself.

Such is the place Lurie has found himself in. His lesbian daughter is now pregnant with the offspring of black thugs who raped her after they locked her father in a bathroom. His daughter refuses to leave her smallholding, even though she has family in Holland. She has agreed, with little or no resistance, to become the concubine of the local “big man” who arranged her rape.

‘How humiliating,’ he says finally. ‘Such high hopes, and to end like this.’

‘Yes, I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point to start from again. Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity.’

‘Like a dog.’

‘Yes, like a dog.’

I doubt that the Nobel committee would have awarded their prize to a novel which described a black family learning to accept their existence as being that of dogs. I don’t, however, think that Coetzee is being political in this book, either in endorsing or excoriating the situation. He merely describes the inevitable, and it is up to the reader to draw his own conclusion about its greater ramifications.

A Watershed Moment in U.S. History

The events of the past week have opened many eyes, and I hope it has changed some hearts. Steve Sailer is doing brisk business in the bloggosphere as he explains what happened in New Orleans, and how it is being spun. Jared Taylor has written a great, no-nonsense article that shouldn’t be missed. And I just recently re-discovered my new most favoritest blog, relapsed catholic.

What a tragedy

BILOXI — Biloxi residents got their first look today at the devastation Hurricane Katrina wreaked on their famed beach front.

Landmarks like Beavoir, the final home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, are virtually demolished.

The Davis home, built in 1854, has been reduced to rubble and a frame of a house.

No Surprise

On a whim, I searched the YWCA's site for the word "Christian." Results? "Nothing Found."

I was relieved to read, however, that "The YWCA is the oldest and largest multicultural women's organization in the world." Whew! At least they have their priorities straight.

Looks like I will have to find another place for a gym membership...

The Cleanup

It has only been two days, but it feels like two years. The time seems to have run together. I want to document all that we have done since it has been so much fun.

Yesterday my husband and my father replaced the locks and I cleaned the hardwood floors and some of the more pressing areas of filth. We made appointments to have a dumpster delivered the next day (today) and to have the two garage door openers fixed or replaced. The gentlemen from the garage door company told my husband that our openers were the oldest working openers he had ever seen. "Working" was loosely interpreted, but we did choose to have both openers replaced due to safety issues. The new openers use sensors to keep them from coming down if anything is in the way, which is necessary with a toddler who loves to push every button she sees.

I bought ceiling paint (but haven't had a chance to apply it). I called a local pool repair company to find out what would be involved in fixing the in-ground pool we were stuck with. We trimmed the tree in the front yard which had grown out into the street. Oh! And my husband bought a riding lawnmower. It seemed at first to be a bit frivolous, but every other house on the block has one. In fact, these people seem to mow their lawns every day—it is just what men *do* here.

Today we were woken up at 6:30 by the waste management facility because the driver came by to drop off our dumpster but were weren’t at the house. Jim and my father ran out of the apartment while I stayed behind to feed Ellie and bring supplies. When I arrived, the dumpster hadn’t yet been delivered, but the garage doors were well on their way to actually opening and closing on demand. We met the neighbors who came out en masse to thank us for trimming the tree in the front yard, and to tell us that they had complained to the previous owners as a group about the fetid swamp that was our pool. I spent the rest of the morning running errands, which included picking up lots of pool chemicals to try to shock the beast into a state of, if not normalcy, at least less pestilential funkitude.

In the afternoon I dumped a bunch of chemicals I didn’t understand into murky green water, and hoped that I wouldn’t catch anything on fire. I made the mistake of using a leaf rake to try to remove the bigger chunks of biological effluvium, but that merely stirred up the murk on the bottom. I realized then that it was indeed possible for the pool to look even worse than it did the day we bought it, which triggered in me a grudging respect and perhaps even affection. The pool has begun to take on a life of its own at this point, swallowing up costly chemicals and my feeble attempts at stewardship with equal derision.

I realize that things would be much simpler if I turned on the filter, but I don’t actually know how to do that. Or where the filter is located, for that matter. It could be hidden in the jungle of weeds we hacked through today in our quest to win neighborly approval through lawn care. We discovered an amazing number of items in the flora of our backyard. My father found an owl statuette. Jim found the solar cover for the pool, which at one time must have been the bee’s knees. I found the pool’s outdoor lighting system, by cutting through a lantern’s plastic insulated wire cable. Like so much about this house, the lighting system was at one time of the highest quality but is now rusted and decayed beyond saving. It is such a pity. However, it feels good to know that at one time a family loved this house very much, and took great care of it. I hope we can live up to the dreams they had for it.