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.

We Have a House!

And it is filthy! But it is ours!

We had our first "final walkthrough" yesterday, where we found piles of junk left in the house and especially the backyard. There was a huge metal desk left in the basement and the pool was literally black with mosquitoes (I bet this is a big hit with the neighbors). We contacted our attorney, and the seller hired a "We-Haul-It" type company to remove his 3 lawnmowers and other seriously nasty junk this morning. We tried to have a FINAL final walk-through this afternoon, but the gentleman had deadbolted the front door, and we couldn't get in. We were able to verify that most of the problematic stuff was removed from the backyard.

Most of the stuff in the house we could live with, assuming he didn't do something truly dasterdly, so the fact that we couldn't walk through it isn't quite so problematic. He did, for some obscure reason, decide to repaint the dining room and living room, including over the beautiful hardwood baseboard and chair railings. I was told to use mineral spirits and lineseed oil to remove the paint. The seller couldn't be bothered to remove the cat-pee soaked area rug, but he felt the need to slop paint onto one of the house's main selling points the day before he moved out.

HOWEVER, the important point is:








We Have a House! (ok, so the bank owns the house and they are letting us pay rent, but work with me here.)

Fried Green Got-Yer-Goat at the Just Desserts Cafe

A Free Stater has proposed that Justice David Souter's house be seized for a hotel, called the "Lost Liberty."

"The justification for such an eminent domain action is that our hotel will better serve the public interest as it will bring in economic development and higher tax revenue to Weare," Logan Darrow Clements of California wrote in a letter faxed to town officials in Weare on Tuesday...
Clements is the CEO of Los Angeles-based Freestar Media that fights "abusive" government through a Web site and cable show. He plans to move to New Hampshire soon as part of the Free State Project, a group that supports limiting government powers...

Closing Woes

We still don’t have a closing date on our house. We had commitment weeks ago, but the seller’s attorney didn’t bother to read our attorney’s letter, which reminded them that they needed an updated survey on the property for our first-time homebuyer’s loan. So here we sit three days over the contract date. The only consolation (if you can call it that), is that the seller was counting on closing this week and took this week off from work. I am not happy that this poor guy sat around for nothing, but I did hear from the grapevine that he raised a royal ruckus with his attorney, and that makes a difference. We, the buyers, can complain until we are blue in the face and it would make no difference in this case. Them’s that writes the check do have some power, and I hope that the house seller gave that attorney of his what-for.

Raising Tomatoes

I should have been blogging about this all along, but I was afraid that it would do nothing but document my failures, and boy, was I right!

Well, not really, since I am learning ninety-nine ways not to grow tomatoes, right? Right?

We live in a duplex, and I currently have nine plants in containers, planted with basil that was started from seed. The plants shot up fast and spindly, and now have a yucky yellowish cast. My neighbor has container tomatoes as well, and her plants are GORGEOUS-- deep green and healthy. I don’t know if I am over-watering or under-watering or if the water isn’t any good to begin with (we have problems with the well in other areas, too).

The plants have fruit, and I hope that they can recover from whatever ails them.

That's Outrageous!

Denver Citizens ejected from a restaurant and public park for opposing illegal immigration

There’s A Fungus Among Us

It looks like the Blessed household will be moving soon into our first house! We have been looking for a house for more than a year now, and are thrilled with what we have found. The house is a real estate dream—a real fixer-upper in a nice neighborhood, and well within our budget.

On Monday, we had the house inspected, using a company that had come highly recommended. The good news is that the inspection found few problems of which we were not already aware. The bad news is that the inspector found mold in the basement.

Yes, mold, which according to the inspector, would simply rise up and kill us dead in a matter of weeks. He recommended gutting the basement entirely, including removing the wood frames, and starting from scratch. Well, the REAL recommendation involved purchasing a $300 test from his company which would allow us to determine what sort of mold we had, therefore allowing us to more precisely engage in the intricate mold abatement program. Apparently, bleach doesn’t kill mold these days, but can cause some kind of chemical reaction which will result in the creation of a SuperMold(tm), known to produce spores the size of small ponies and vote Democrat.

I am very grateful for the mold education we have received, since I have been sick with some type of respiratory infection for the past two weeks. I am convinced that this is the result of walking through this particular house three or four times without a full HAZMAT suit. I think our daughter is also being affected. I hear her give the same barking 3-packs-a-day cough which has become my personal trademark, especially after I have been taken over with an uncontrollable fit on the phone to one of the battalion of contractors with whom I have been speaking in the past few weeks. Some would say mimicry, but I am convinced she has been exposed to the dread tortious moldus.

Seriously, there is mold in the basement. The house is filthy, as the owners simply don’t seem to be interested in cleaning it. Considering the house’s neglect, the fact that there is so little mold in the basement, and that there is no seepage, to us is a cause for jubilation. I think we can go far by ripping out the carpet and applying a bleach water solution to the walls. We will also be running a dehumidifier.

On a more dire note, the kitchen has no dishwasher, and no place to put one. Yes, I was horrified, too. What barbarians! However, the dishwasher will have to wait, because the tile in the bathroom is rotting out. Did I mention the house is a fixer-upper? Oh! And the house has a pool with a busted liner, affectionately known as the Toddler Pit of Drowning. For some reason, we are taking these issues a bit more seriously than the need to firebomb our basement.

On Corporations Running Scared from Abortion Lobby

At the end of 2004, one of the elders at Trinity Baptist Church was fired from his job. It was Jerry Mestas. We appreciate Jerry because he is an evangelist, whose heart is thankful enough for the life and leadership of Jesus Christ, that he overflows in normal conversation about his Savior. He is bold, and he is always available to tell the story.

Read More

From Scott Brown Online via the House of Degenhart.

Faithful in All Things

There is a blog that I just recently started reading that is one of the most humbling, edifying, and uplifting sites I could visit. It is written by a Christian woman who lives to serve the Lord and her husband, and through her posts other women by her godly instruction and example. I can crunch through hundreds of sites a day, but Kristen’s blog is so full of illuminating truth that one of her posts sustains me for days. Recently she has taken on women blogging, "Angel" paraphernalia, Laura Bush's public behavior, along with her continuing chapter-by-chapter study of Debi Pearl’s Created to Be His Help Meet.

I am speaking, of course, of Walking Circumspectly.

Toddlers mean! Women and children hardest hit.

With our manufacturing base gone in this country, everyone scrambles for a cushy make-believe job. We don’t actually *do* anything, but we have to keep the rodent wheel spinning somehow. I have to admit I admire the obviously frustrated researchers who were able to come up with this study. Publish or perish, baby.

Recommended Site

GovTrack.us

GovTrack.us fills the need for a source of information useful for people. It is both a large collection of data as well as a tool for filtering out what you don't want to see. You can dig deep in GovTrack, finding information the mass media does not have room for, and you can let GovTrack send information to you, like a newspaper customized to your interests. It's the power of the Internet put to use to close the citizen-country divide.

Note that once you have selected to monitor a Congresscritter or subject, you can embed these searches into your website or blog for daily updates.

Random Links

Obesity is becoming a problem of the affluent:

In the early 1970s, 22.5 percent of people with incomes below $25,000 were obese. By 2002, 32.5 percent of the poor were. By comparison, just 9.7 percent of people with incomes above $60,000 were obese in the 1970s — a figure that jumped to 26.8 percent in 2002.

I personally blame the bacon bandages for the problem.

Christian Video Games?
This is a topic dear to me. I am a gamer, or used to be. Lately I have lost all interest—I even tried the EverQuest II 7-day trial and was left cold, but I have fond memories of gaming and empathize with this man’s attempt to square that circle. Is it possible? Probably not. However, I think this article does a good job fairly describing the challenges developer Rev. Ralph Bagley is facing trying to serve two masters.