Half a Glass or Half Empty?

After President Obama's prime-time-televised press conference last night, I'm wondering how many more he will want to subject us to. Frankly, I agree with Bill O'Reilly. It was boring. And I thought he sounded a lot like an Economics 101 or 102 student making a class room presentation.

But I may be wrong. Most of the conservative talking heads disagreed with Bill and thought Obama had stayed on message and made his point well: We are in "dire" straits," the worst straits since the Great Depression, so we have to do something as quickly as possible. How do you rate the logic of such an assertion?

The stimulus bill has grown in the Senate. Many of the social reprogramming contained in the House bill is still there. I'm thinking about health care especially. Although government health care is sold as a benefit, what would the result be? Would you believe possibly lowering the age expectancy...and definitely the "quality" of life of the elderly? Read what Hudson fellow Betsy McCaughey has to say on Bloomberg.com: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&refer=columnist_mccaughey&sid=aLzfDxfbwhzs#

And here's how government care is working in Canada:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123413701032661445.html

One Canadian responded to the Journal, writing "I'm in Newfoundland, Canada, 74 years old and in need of a hip replacement as it's bone on bone. I have an appointment to see a doctor on October 20th of this year. Meanwhile I carry on the best I can. I would be better off if I was a dog in need of a vet” (Robert McCrindle).

I realize it is also true that many in the U.S. can't get hip replacement surgery because they can't afford it and don't have good health insurance coverage, but shouldn't the answer be to expand coverage rather than to limit proceedures and apply the rule of equal discomfort for all?

McCaughey reports, "the health-care industry is the largest employer in the U.S. It produces almost 17 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. Yet the bill treats health care the way European governments do: as a cost problem instead of a growth industry." She tries to imagine limiting "growth and innovation" in the electronics industry during this downturn. Moving this back a few years, try to imagine life without the IPOD, smart phones, Kindle etc., to say nothing about the amazing expanding internet.

President Obama claimed he is "a perennial optimist" toward the end of his designed-to-alarm press conference. Before his administration tackles the best health care in the world, I hope his spirits rise, and he sees more good outcomes to increase than hardships to impose.

Plum Duff Updated!

Here's an updated version of plum duff from Graham Hawkes' Flannagans Seafood Restaurant in Invercargill, New Zealand: http://www.stuff.co.nz/AAMB1/aamsz=300x600/4796158a7774.html.
It looks yummy, even if we're past the Christmas season!

Now, can anyone tell me how to translate grams to cups?

Sunday Morning Blues

My husband had an interesting thought this morning: Rather than asking "are you better off now than four or eight or ten years ago?" ask "are your children better off than four, eight, ten or more years ago?" I think most might answer in the negative.

Dale's thought was prompted by thinking about the cost of the proposed stimulus bill for future generations. And I'm thinking about educational results that have slid downhill for 40 or more years and of the many aspects of the culture that are toxic to a life to be well lived.

Houses Split Asunder

I never took one of the Marriage and the Family courses in college, perhaps to my detriment. At the time these didn’t seem grandly intellectual. I think later they gave way to even less intellectual offerings in women’s departments.

Today, I am reconsidering my earlier prejudice. I’ve been reading the latest (January/February) issue of Touchstone magazine (A Journal of Mere Christianity) and the issue’s theme is “Meaningful Intercourse,” and yes, the editors do mean sexual.

The main point of one article, “Phony Matrimony,” is encapsulated in this quote: “Mainstream American society, even as it is statistically somewhat more opposed to same-sex marriage than in favor of it, envisions ‘marriage’ in a way that cannot bear any rational scrutiny of its exclusion of same-sex couples.” The reason is most marriages today are considered revocable; “for better or worse… until death do us part” has become a rhetorical flourish only, and more tellingly, bearing children has become optional.

Modern marriage’s revolving door makes the institution more attractive to the irresponsible “love” bitten and to the commitment phobic, and splitting the roles of “spouse” and “parent” has undermined the necessity of marriage and shaped it as an optional living arrangement, while opening the door of acceptability to any kind of alternative.

If you are like me, there’s pause here because I share the guilt. Along with, I’d guess, a majority of people, I fall short of the traditional Roman Catholic ideal of marriage. I may have some excuse in being raised Protestant, but I am more significantly a part, as are most of us inescapably, of what Oleson terms “our cultural deterioration.” We have been raised so and confirmed so by all the social forces around us. The Catholic church’s position on contraception seemed archaic and alien to me in my child-bearing years, just as the Church’s position on abortion seems archaic, alien, and oppressive to many sexually liberated women today.

However, it’s not individuals that Oleson seeks to condemn, it’s the cultural debasement he wishes to counter. And he recognizes that the task will be long, quoting Alaisdair Macintyre’s After Virtue… “through the new dark ages that are already upon us.”

Don’t expect the government to help. Stephen Baskerville takes on the culture and business of divorce in “Divorced From Reality,” in the same Touchstone issue. This one you can read online: http://touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=22-01-019-f. Baskerville asserts: “Divorce licenses unprecedented government intrusion into family life, including the power to sunder families, seize children, loot family wealth, and incarcerate parents without trial.”

If this language seems intemperate to you, go the website and read the entire piece. No-fault divorce is seldom a rational decision made by two adults; rather in 80% of cases (Divided Families by Furstenberg and Cherlin), one spouse objects. Such “involuntary divorce,” Baskerville’s term, brings in “an army of judicial hangers-on who reward belligerence and profit from the ensuing litigation: judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, counselors, mediators, custody evaluators, social workers, and more.” And it doesn’t end there: “involuntary divorce by its nature requires constant government supervision over family life.”

Children become “the principal weapons of the divorce machinery.” And the usual result is to remove the father from the home… innocent of any crime and without any burden of proof for justification. A father can be arrested “for seeing …children without government authorization…for not paying child support, even if the amount exceeds his means…and for not paying an attorney or a psychotherapist he has not hired.” Although all this would seem a violation of basic constitutional right, Baskerville points out the “multi-billion divorce industry also commands a huge government-funded propaganda machine that has distorted our view of what is happening.”

Baskerville goes on to outline “Divorce Gamesmanship,” “Cycle of Abuse,” “Trafficking in Children,” “The Child Support Racket,” and finally the “Responsibility of Churches. He believes families need to be protected from government “invasion” and endorses the work of Marriage Savers (http://www.marriagesavers.org/sitems/SavingMarriages/).

I think all of us know there is a crisis in family life in the US and seemingly throughout the Western world. No marriage is ever trouble free, and sticking with a “bad” marriage may seem like suffering through a life sentence, but there are also cycles in marriages; things often get better. And we need to acknowledge also that although “no-fault” divorce makes a mockery of marriage as a contract, there are legitimate grounds (unrepentant adultery and abuse) for divorce in civil society. It’s just tragic that the actual choice is so often made frivolously by one party without due consideration of consequence. Perhaps Marriage and the Family courses need to be reinstated.

Fear Itself

A friend has sent me a link (http://www1.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=4288&mn=24021&pt=msg&mid=6595729) to a revealing history of the origins of global warming alarmism...and at the same time an extremely informative site for serious investors (not me, unfortunately). It's a story of "follow the [funding] money" coupled with messianic visions of world government and simple lust (to make this summary a little sexier) for political power, all by John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel. You'll enjoy...or grit your teeth.

Light My World!

I used to muse, when we lived in Port Townsend, Washington (a quaint, touristy Victorian seaport, harshly split between granola crunchers from California and PT-born paper mill workers and others scrambling for a living) that a Hollywood Video store, complete with garish pink and orange neon, was needed on the main street, Water Street—or at least on the road into town—to add a bit of reality and discourage further migration from the south.

Now I learn that Las Vegas wants stimulus money for more neon—off the strip—because there’s not enough glitz “off the beaten path,” says the Wall Street Journal. The project “will revitalize a blighted neighborhood,” says the city’s spokesperson.

Now, I think I was wrong in my earlier thinking. Neon won’t necessarily scare away Californians and others who want to change communities…always for the better, of course. Neon won’t provide many additional jobs for locals in blighted neighborhoods in Vegas, but it might light their way home at night.

Trumped!

Republican Judd Gregg is the new secretary of commerce...and his Senate seat will go to a moderate Republican and be up for grabs in the next election, all according to a deal made between Gregg and the Democrat governor of New Hampshire (with or without White House participation).

So let me get this straight: it's not OK to sell a Senate seat, but one can be bartered. Pardon me if this seems rather like a hostile takeover of a fragile Republican filibuster card in the Senate.