Haggin' out

Update on Sunday, May 2: The show on Thursday was postponed because Merle was sick, so we're seeing him tonight instead. And you're not! Neener neener!

What's better than finding out that Merle Haggard is playing in the next city? Having a friend who gets you comp tickets!

My Lovely and Brilliant Wife and I will be seeing the legend himself tomorrow night up in Wenatchee. Despite being from California, she was just a little vague on exactly who Merle was, so I obligingly inflicted one video after another on her this morning. By the time we get to Wenatchee, she'll probably be so sick of hearing The Hag that she'll cling to the doorposts screaming to be spared from going into the stadium.

In the course of looking around for videos, I ran across this little gem: a duet with Ernest Tubb (may the whiteness of his sainted Stetson never be dimmed!). Merle comes on at about 1:41.


Merle Haggard And Ernest Tubb - The best video clips are here

Make slavery safe, legal and rare!

Ever notice that in most discussions of abortion, you could swap "property rights" for "abortion rights," "slave dealer" for "abortionist" and "abolitionist" for "anti-abortion activist," and have the exact same argument as two centuries ago? Try it with this nauseating lament and see for yourself.

It seems the old generation of slaveholders is beginning to die out, and the young people don't have the same enthusiasm for holding their fellow man in bondage. Who, the writer wonders, will keep the negroes on the plantation for years to come? Will the peculiar institution die out for lack of enthusiasm? Never, cries our stalwart columnist! It must not be! My darkies, my choice!

My fondest hope is that one day abortion will be as repugnant as slavery, and for the same reason - there is no excuse for one person's humanity being at the sole discretion of another. It's not a matter of "moral complexities." It's a matter of whether human rights actually mean anything at all. If a human being is either ownable or disposable, then they don't. It's the same old argument with different victims.

My grandson, my revenge

Remember how your parents always said, "I hope you have one just like you?"


It works!

Boys beware!

Go ahead and watch this film. I know it's kind of offensive, but watch it anyway. You'll need it for reference.




All done? Good. Look, this film was made in 1961. As late as the 1970s I remember being warned about homosexuals and public restrooms every time we went to Portland to go shopping. Times have changed. Can we agree that this would be repudiated today?

Except in one case, and here's where you need to think back to the film. If you made this film today, and replaced the word "homosexual" with "priest," it would be acclaimed in media reviews and perhaps shown in every school in the country. Put a white collar on Ralph and nobody would question its veracity.

Want evidence? Pull up almost any news story dealing with the Catholic Church. Even on an unrelated story, look down at the reader comments and see how far down you have to read before some yahoo brings up the fondling fathers. It's worse on the actual abuse stories. Some people actually believe that the Church runs schools and orphanages for the sole purpose of keeping its priests supplied with victims. And God forbid anyone should suggest that any accusation might be exaggerated. Better to be a Nazi than a priest in today's climate.

I once asked David Clohessy, the executive director of SNAP (Survivors' Network of those Abused by Priests) whether his organization had ever, under any circumstances, admitted that a given priest had been cleared of charges and deserved to be left in ministry. He didn't answer, but a look at the organization's website suggests that they not only haven't, but would consider the whole idea preposterous. An uncharged priest is just a pervert who hasn't been caught yet.

This leads into another post, which I'll put up in a bit.

There's oldies...

...and then there's oldies.



A song by Nick Alexander that I put up with Long Drink in mind. He's taken up Latin as a hobby and I thought he'd get a kick out of it.

This one's for Ricki

Because there might be a couple of variations here that she hasn't heard a thousand times.

Swinging into the weekend

It's been a while since I've posted. Not that there's any lack of things to comment on these days. But between work and family stuff, there just hasn't been much time. (Including planning a family reunion! More about that as it unfolds.)

So just for the heck of it, a western swing song that I find darkly amusing (and unable to get out of my head) from the Sweet Violet Boys, courtesy of High-Falutin' Newton:

Ask your doctor if it's right for you

There was a time when I wish my doctor would have said these things to me.



The dialogue in this is NSFW, which in this case stands for Not Safe For Wives. Nor for work, for that matter. A little crude. But gents, you'll appreciate it.

Via Miss C.

See what I mean?

Here's a good example of the sort of sneering I was responding to in my earlier post:

In fact, it does not matter what Wal-Mart does. We will still hate it. Because our hatred for Wal-Mart is not, in fact, based on anything the company does; it is based on what the company is. It is a big box. A big, bland, concrete warehouse. It hurts us, the very vision of it. Wal-Mart comes into town and builds an ugly box and then all the regular little stores shut down, and all that is left is a big ugly box on the outskirts of town. And inside that box are bright, harsh lights and ugly Republican people and lots of NASCAR-branded items and a pervasive atmosphere of small-town hopelessness.

I'll bet Hamilton Nolan (hereinafter referred to as "Dickhead") has never tried to support a family of nine on an annual salary under thirty grand. That's the sort of thing that only us ugly, hopeless, Republican Wal-Mart customers would do. While raising the ugly, hopeless, Republican children that will someday support his pretty, selfish, elitist ass.

A valentine to film noir

Found this over at Miss Cellania's place. I love the way it brings out the natural subconscious rhythm of the noir. The YouTube page has a list of the films used. I was surprised at how many I recognized but couldn't put a name to. I'll have to watch again and see if they jump out at me a little more.

I wish there were a way to give the maker of this video as much applause as he (she?)deserves.

Refusing to sow the seeds of prosperity

When the economy tanks, it's trendy to blame either the president in power or his predecessor, whichever one you voted against. In reality, there's dang little that a president can do to affect the economy very much, at least in our checked-and-balanced system. Little nudges here and there are the most we can - or should - expect from a chief executive.

So I don't hold either President Obama or President Bush responsible for the current recession. It was going to happen anyway, sooner or later. Later it might have been worse.

That said, I think we're inexorably headed for a crash that will make this one look like a minor slump. It will hit just as my Generation X begins to head into the later years of our lives. Already, we're the first generation since the turn of the last century to earn less money overall than our parents. And we're shaping up to be poorer than our children, too.

But that's for those of us who have children. Mark Steyn enunciates what I've been saying for years to anyone who will listen: Contraception and child-aversion are literally going to be the ruin of our country.

What’s happening in the developed world today isn’t so very hard to understand: The 20th-century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless, insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany, and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they’ve reached the next stage in social-democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over. The United States has a fertility rate of around 2.1 — or just over two kids per couple. Greece has a fertility rate of about 1.3: Ten grandparents have six kids have four grandkids — ie, the family tree is upside down. Demographers call 1.3 “lowest-low” fertility — the point from which no society has ever recovered. And, compared to Spain and Italy, Greece has the least worst fertility rate in Mediterranean Europe.

So you can’t borrow against the future because, in the most basic sense, you don’t have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at 58, which sounds great. But, when ten grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around? [Emphases mine]

This is another case in which there's not a heck of a lot the government can do. It's societal attitudes that need to change, and government is notoriously bad at accomplishing that.

As Steyn points out, each generation is eventually dependent on the generation following it to pay the taxes that will support us. The way our economy is structured now, we're dependent on generations not yet born to repay our debts. This would be possible if there were going to be enough producers to support their elders who are becoming consumers. But Americans are trying hard to ensure there won't be.

Look at the vile way the Duggar family is spoken of in liberal circles. (This attitude isn't limited to political liberals, but that does seem to be where it's strongest.) They're called creepy, brainwashed, disgusting. One assclown wrote a screed four and a half years – and three Duggars – ago that still makes me want to take a two-by-four to his skull.

How a person reacts to the Duggar family – or even to our own eight kids – says volumes about how much he cares about the future.

Now, I know people who have no children for valid reasons. I'm thinking of one blog-friend (whom I won't link because I don't want to embarrass her) who says frankly that her own upbringing was so screwed up that she doesn't think she could raise children well. Obviously there are people who have never married, or stayed married, and so aren't in a position to raise kids. And naturally there are people who simply can't produce any. So it goes. Families like ours can fill a little bit of the gap.

But what about the vast number of Americans who simply don't want to have children, or who intentionally have only one or two, because they don't want to go to the trouble? They don't want to have to shop at Wal-Mart, or pre-plan their evenings out, or work at a job that allows time for a family. That's their choice, you say? Their preference? Practicing responsible family planning? Phooey. That's selfishness. It's the equivalent of dining-and-dashing. And the party at the next table is going to be stuck with the tab.

As we see in Stein's article, the current crisis in Greece is the same thing we're gearing up for. Currently we're coasting on the fecundity of our grandparents and great-grandparents. But twenty years from now, there will be no legacy left. To quote Robert Heinlein, nobody owns his genes; he's merely their custodian. Non-breeders have no right to leave the rest of us in the lurch this way.

What we need is to stop regarding children as a hassle, or as a burden, or as a commodity. That's right, the "As God is my witness I will give birth to something that looks just like me" people - the ones who insist on fertility treatments and in vitro fertilization instead of adopting children who need parents - have the same crappy approach that the intentionally childless have. In both cases, they're treating children as something other than what they are: little people. Human beings, the same as themselves.

Now, it sounds like I'm making a contradiction here. Are children people, or are they taxpayers? The truth is, they're both. They're human beings whose existence is intrinsically a good thing. And they're also our future. They're worth having and worth investing in. A society that values them will be a society that benefits from them. A society that prevents, aborts and objectifies them is headed over the precipice. It's probably already too late.

H/T to The Paragraph Farmer.

Next week on Family Guy...

Meg's new classmate is a little girl described as a "pickaninny," who says "Mah mamma is the Fuhst Lady and the President's mah daddy... Ah thinks."

Liberals expected to find this hilarious.

'Sgen ti sws i fi? (For Wharf Rat)

Making some use of the USB turntable my Lovely and Brilliant Wife gave me as a Father's Day present last year, I transferred some hard-to-find Welsh pop from vinyl to the computer. I remember Wharf Rat singing along with this song when she wasn't much more than three or four.

The title means "Do you have a kiss for me?" It's a really cute song by an 80s pop band called Bando, sung from the POV of children on the playground. The sort of rap-esque parts are actually Welsh nursery rhymes. Wharf Rat knew those, too, as I used to read them to her. If I get time I may see if I can transcribe the words one of these days. This is the accent I learned the language in, but I've gotten so rusty it's hard to make out some of them and the lyric sheet I had for the album has long ago disappeared.

I've heard of Miller Time, but...

This wasn't even a typo or anything. It was just a really, really unfortunate juxtaposition. The news layout person here at The Greatest Newspaper in the Northwest™ can't see the ads on the screen, so she had no idea what was next to the headline. Fortunately, the realtor (whose face I've intentionally blurred) has a good sense of humor.

It reminds me of a time years ago, when we still ran our own presses, and we got a furious phone call from the owner of a restaurant. He had placed an ad for experienced cooks and was unhappy with the result. Seems back in the press room, a speck of dust had fallen on the plate and turned the second "o" into a "c." That the ad also said "References required" didn't help. That guy didn't have a sense of humor. But then, who could blame him with the calls he was probably getting?

Looking backward through a glass darkly

For our anniversary, my Lovely and Brilliant Wife gave me a VCR-Computer converter so I could put the old movies I've stored away on VHS onto my computer and thence onto DVD. Well, the first thing I converted was my dad's wedding video from 1985. Because it wasn't copyrighted, I stuck it up on the Internet Archive for the world to see.

The quality is a little grungy, either from the aged tape or from my too-wimpy computer. Mostly it will be of interest to family members, although anyone who wants to is welcome to mock the sight of me, standing up as the best man at 18 in my first grown-up suit. (I still have that jacket hanging in my closet.)

It was really strange hearing my dad's voice. See, I sound a whole lot like him, just slightly lower. But Long Drink could be a ringer for him every time he opens his mouth. I hadn't realized they were that similar. Mostly, it was good just to see my dad as I remember him, six years before he died. We had kind of a complicated relationship, my dad and I, and I wish he could have lived to see it settle into normalcy and to enjoy his tribe of grandchildren.

I thought we settled this at Yorktown

BBC: Why don't Americans vote like their betters?

Condescending gits.

Smoke this, Frank Rich!

I can't see why anyone would waste perfectly good ink on this uncultured ass-ferret.

[T]he most common last-ditch argument for preserving “don’t ask” heard last week, largely from Southern senators, is to protect “troop morale and cohesion.” Every known study says this argument is a canard, as do the real-life examples of the many armies with openly gay troops, including those of Canada, Britain and Israel. But the argument does carry a telling historical pedigree. When Harry Truman ordered the racial integration of the American military in 1948, Congressional opponents (then mainly Southern Democrats) embraced an antediluvian Army prediction from 1940 stating that such a change would threaten national defense by producing “situations destructive to morale.” History will sweep this bogus argument away now as it did then.

This from a carefully-balanced editorial called "Smoke the Bigots out of the Closet." See, in Rich's world, it's only bigotry that keeps us all from thrusting the entire U. S. military into a frenzy of fabulosity.

Now, personally, I think the whole issue is going to need to be dealt with soon, and the solution is not to keep gay people out of the service altogether. DADT was nothing more than a stopgap and I don't think anyone expected it to be. I'm glad to see that President Obama isn't trying to force the issue through himself. Frankly, I don't think he's got the chops with the military to pull it off, even as commander-in-chief. But if the push comes from senior officers who have earned respect, they may be able to work out an accommodation that doesn't alienate the vast majority of servicemen who are heterosexual.

But Rich will have none of that. He draws on his vast knowledge of military culture, gleaned from avoiding service in Vietnam, to show that John McCain actually knows nothing about the profession of arms. And clearly, Marine wife Cassandra is just ironing her sheet and soaking her cross in gasoline when she writes:

Unlike skin color, human sexuality - whether female or male, heterosexual or homosexual - is a fundamental and extremely powerful driver of human behavior. To elide past this basic truth requires an almost willful act of blindness.

My own opinions about both women and gays openly serving in the military have undergone a radical shift during the last thirty years. I began by seeing no reason why both women and gays shouldn't be able to serve anywhere they wished to. What changed my mind over the years, contrary to the bigoted assertions of close minded individuals who refuse to entertain ideas that challenge their world view, was not misogyny or fear of Teh Gay...

There are rational objections to allowing gays to serve openly and they aren't based on the assumption that homosexuals behave differently than heterosexuals. They are based on the assumption that gays are no different from you and me. How is that bigotry?

Well, to Frank Rich, "bigotry" actually translates to "ability to count to twenty-one with your fly zipped." Read the whole thing. That will put you light-years ahead of the washed-up ignoramus who edits the New York Times.

P.S.: Here's more bigotry information from Cassandra that the Times will vilify you for knowing.

This is a vague title

I do this, at least on the rare occasions anymore that I write a long enough post. In fact, this is the two-sentence version of the same thing.

H/T to Patrick.

How is it possible...

... that these people once ruled a quarter of the globe?

I'm beginning to agree with Kathy Shaidle's assessment of modern Britain - "Dear Luftwaffe: Please come back. All is forgiven."

I'm evil

Clark and Vivian, wherever you are, forgive me.