Friday Photo

Homegrown Rainbow

Flower judging (judgement?) at the Ohio County Fair, held at Oglebay Resort. Gorgeous, aren’t they? Enjoy large.

I simply love flowers. If they’re this beautiful, this vibrant, this radiant here and now, how will they look in eternity? It makes me think of C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, how the grass was sharp, the light almost unbearably bright, the colours indescribably more, say, green than green could ever be in the fallen world. On our way to this fair, we drove through what is clearly God’s country in West Virginia and northern Ohio, alongside the river, passing cliffs and forest. To me, it’s wonderfully beautiful, and the thought of God ultimately destroying all of it makes me sad.

But as usual, He never lets us down. “If you think it is beautiful and amazing now, daughter, imagine how it will be.”

Oh. Well then.

Not that I’ll cease from appreciating what we’ve been given for now. One would be a fool even to contemplate such a thing!

~ ~ ~

Soooo Algore won the Nobel Peace Prize. Aside from the pure ridiculesness of this, when one considers another nominee had saved 2500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto and was tortured by the Nazis for doing so, and another fights for religious freedom, what does making a movie full of falsifications have to do with world peace? As past recipients (Hitler, Castro, Arafat, Jimmy Carter) reveal, the prize is pointless, but the powerful elites take it seriously. Besides, Jews aren’t popular and neither are Christians.

Algore is kind of snide anyhow. If I didn’t know he was Tennessean, I’d have pegged him as a native Washingtonian or New Yorker. He certainly hasn’t the charm and grace endemic to the Tennesseans I’ve met.

Furthermore, Medals of Honour are about to be awarded to real heroes. While Algore gets all the glory, all the sunlight, those who truly do forge the way for peace (“…men shall cry, ‘Peace! Peace!’…”) are ignored.
Men like Navy SEAL Lt. Michael P. Murphy, who was killed in Afghanistan. This is the first Medal of Honour given to troops who’ve served in Afghanistan, and the first a SEAL has gotten since Vietnam.

Lt. Michael P. Murphy, 29, who had SEAL training here and was assigned to a SEAL team in Hawaii, was killed in June 2005 during a mission in the Hindu Kush mountains to find a key Taliban leader.

Ambushed by insurgents, Murphy’s four-man SEAL team engaged in a fierce firefight and was in danger of being overrun.

Although he was wounded, Murphy risked his life to save fellow SEALs and then maneuvered into an open position to send out an emergency call and to continue firing at the enemy. While making the call, he was hit again.

Only one of the SEALs on the team survived. Eight other SEALs and eight soldiers aboard a MH-47 Chinook helicopter sent to rescue Murphy’s team also were killed when the craft was brought down by a rocket-propelled grenade.

The incident was the worst single-day loss of life for Navy Special Warfare personnel since World War II.

…(Murphy’s) father, Daniel, an attorney and a combat veteran of the Vietnam War, said the assignment to Afghanistan was particularly important to his son. Murphy had friends in the New York police and fire departments and wore an NYFD patch on his uniform.

“He told me, ‘We’re going where the people who planned, plotted and recruited for 9/11 are,’ ” Daniel Murphy said.

As Laura Ingraham so angrily points out, important and affirming stories like this are ignored for the glitz and glitter of Algore, Britney, Survivor (are you kidding me?), Paris, Dancing With The C-List, and the other filth our pop culture consists of. It’s almost enough to make one lose hope, that we’re besotted with stupidity and vulgarity while brave men like Michael Murphy, Ray Smith, Jason Dunham, Marcus Luttrell, and all the other American warriors are suffering and dying to protect our liberty and freedom.

Yes, they fight so we can live as we please, but I suspect those who’ve spilt blood for that purpose would hope we’d spend our lives more appropriately than reading People and watching John Gibson’s show.

I’m quickly, quickly losing patience with those who spend their time with such things. I’m not perfect, but for Pete’s sake, aren’t there more uplifting and good things we can spend our time absorbing? Is it any wonder our culture is a mess, that we seem lost? We’re focusing on the vapid and aimless, feasting on vulgarity, when there are heroes with stories just waiting to be told, whose valour would lift us up instead of drag us down. Stories of men like these can and do make us better. Do the antics of the latest tartlet or the self-serving lies of a charlatan hoping for a world-government do that? Do they encourage nobility or disparage it?

Speaking of good, solid entertainment, The Woman at Pier 13, filmed under the title I Married A Communist, airs on TCM tomorrow morning. Tape it. Watch it. And hang on to it, as it’s not released on DVD; you know there was no problem with commies in America in the 50s, of course.

Another soldier story? How about that of Army medics who removed an explosive RPG from the body of another soldier? That’s bravery. That’s nobility. I love these guys.

One more? When a soldier comes home…. A must see. It certainly puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?

The rest of this shall have to be short, as I sprained my hand recently. Whether it was planting our new apple tree in the front yard (hurrah!), painting the front door (yay!), priming the kitchen and garage door or something else, I know not, but what I do know is that my right hand is presently burning as if on fire.

Rabbi Berel Wein on the difference between unity and conformity.

Liberty or security — a false choice by David Limbaugh (yes, satan has two spawn upon the earth, didn’t you know?).

Via Atlas Shrugs, we learn that the Palestinians are now demanding the Western Wall. *sigh*

Speaking of foolish capitulation, as dropsofjupiterihh pointed out in the comments, yesterday a letter from 138 Muslim scholars warned that “the survival of the world” is risked if Christians and Muslims don’t start getting along soon. (I didn’t get to this yesterday due to said angry hand.) The letter was sent to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope, among others.

The Muslim scholars state: “As Muslims, we say to Christians that we are not against them and that Islam is not against them – so long as they do not wage war against Muslims on account of their religion, oppress them and drive them out of their homes.”

…It continues: “Finding common ground between Muslims and Christians is not simply a matter for polite ecumenical dialogue between selected religious leaders.

“Together they (Muslims and Christians) make up more than 55 per cent of the population, making the relationship between these two religious communities the most important factor in contributing to meaningful peace around the world. If Muslims and Christians are not at peace, the world cannot be at peace.”

As dropsofjupiterihh correctly noted, Muslims are required to give three warnings before launching an attack, and the Osama bin Laden tapes from September can easily be considered the first. Does Ahminajihad’s visit to Columbia count? I’m not sure. Regardless…pray, keep watch, stay prepared. What this really means is submit, not make peace with one another. This is what we get just prior to the “convert or die” chat with a sword to our neck.

No matter what George W. Bush says, Muslims do NOT pray to the same God Jews and Christians do. Our God is one of love, not hate and domination.

More happily, Bill Meisheid is starting a new study, this one about getting to know our Father.

The great Fjordman and The Age of White Masochism.

…In the name of Multiculturalism we completely ignore all ethnic, religious, cultural and, yes, racial differences, because we have decided that these things don’t matter. But in real life, ethnicity, culture, religion and race do matter. Doesn’t that mean that all our projections for the future by necessity will end up being wrong, since they fail to take important factors into account?

Policy needs to be rooted in a realistic assessment of human nature, not in wishful thinking. Good intentions are far from sufficient to ensure good results. History is full of well-intended policies gone horrible wrong. We know from past experience that basing an ideological world view on a fundamentally flawed understanding of human nature is bound to end in disaster. Society will become more and more totalitarian in order to suppress all the information that doesn’t conform to the official ideology. Isn’t this what is happening in the West now?

I used to believe until quite recently that skin color was irrelevant. I was brought up that way. I still don’t think ethnicity or race does or should mean everything. In fact, I would say it is patently uncivilized to claim that it means everything. But I can no longer say with a straight face that it means absolutely nothing, and if it means more than nothing, it needs to be taken into account. Whether we like this or not is immaterial.

Another must-read.

More about Burma, where things still go badly for freedom and those who fight for it. Additionally, I wanted to share with you a video sent to me by Amil Imani, this about Iran.

Oh, those who fight for real liberty…they are the great ones. Those who spit upon them and mock their mission are warted toads at the feet of princes.

Earlier this week, Charles Krauthammer called Shrillary’s government-funded IRA “innocuous”. Not so much. Who decides to which funds the millions of dollars go? That’s a little unnerving. Furthermore, it’s another encroachment of the federal government, which gets a big “No, thank you” from me (where do the matching funds come from, anyhow?). Besides, what happens if (venturing into CrazyTown here) it is decided those funds should be “redirected” for “the greater good”?

According to the good doctor in today’s column, such a program could set things up for a later administration to shift the disaster that is Social Security to a fully private system, but who says Shrillary leaves after (God help us) 8 years? That’s not something I see happening — a shift to a private program with a government-run version as the bridge. Things just don’t seem to work that way, do they?

Krauthammer also suggests that he and others who put national security first could “live with her” as president,

…precisely because she is so liberated from principle. Her liberalism, like her husband’s — flexible, disciplined, calculated, triangulated — always leaves open the possibility that she would do the right thing for the blessedly wrong (i.e., self-interested, ambition-serving, politically expedient) reason.

…On Iraq, for example, she talks like someone who knows she may soon be commander in chief and will need room to maneuver in order to achieve whatever success might be possible.

Well, that’s all very logical, much of it is true (Hillary being, ah, “liberated from principle”, as he so eloquently phrased it) and I do see his point (the Clintons are famously self-serving), but it leaves out large parts of the Shrillary Presidency Equation, such as the full force of the government being pressed down upon the We, The People, when it comes to things like freedom of speech (“hate speech” in England could now get you 7 years in prison), national healthcare, environmental and border policies? What about higher taxes (horrifically higher)? Gun grabs? In other words, she is quite a threat to good, old-fashioned liberty, particularly with a Democrat Congress that will cheerfully put into effect her whims and her desire for full control. Would we be left with a real America?

Dr. Krauthammer is a perceptive and smart man, but perhaps someone has surreptitiously given him a shot of Klinton Kool-Aid. No, dahling, I couldn’t live with her, not life in the way God intended; nor could most Americans. Sure, she might let all heck loose on our enemies to bolster her image, and that could be a good thing for our safety, but that doesn’t exactly mean everything else evens out in the wash, so to speak.

Finally, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser (a Muslim himself) on Congress’ silly recognition of Ramadan this week:

A failure of our political leadership to know and state the true ideological conflicts in this war will continue to enable the enemies of freedom at home and abroad. Our political leadership seems unable to foster or demand real accountability within the Muslim population who enjoy America’s liberty, but would rather shirk their duty to treat the cancer within our own Muslim faith community’s ideologies.

… if we as Muslims were to truly honor the spirituality and purity of Ramadan, American Muslims should not be asking for symbolic patronizing niceties from Congress but rather asking for their real assistance in a counter-Jihad against radical Islamism. (emphasis original)

Rather than Congress issuing patronizing proclamations, American Muslims should be issuing proclamations during this month of atonement recognizing all of the heavy lifting we have not done and yet must do within our own house of faith to deconstruct political Islam and its root cause effect upon terrorism.

And that’s it. Have a marvellous weekend! God bless America and Israel, and may He guide and protect our troops.