The Governor Gets Rand-y

I'm glad he does because I sure don't. I read one of them, either The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. That was enough. Stilted prose and a philosophy totally ignorant of the human condition is a bad combination. At least I don't find it appealing. Governor Sanford appears to be a fan and wrote her a little love letter that Newsweek, for some reason, decided to publish. Now I'm not going to run down the Governor for his transcontinental booty call. In fact, I think he's a true lover boy. A powerful, successful man with the emotional development of a smitten 13 year old. It was an epic fail, flaming out for all the world to see. Much better than the tawdry mud wrestling adventure of that Ensign guy, what with the best friend's wife and the payoff and all. Like the difference between jumping off the Empire State Building holding two lit road flares and choking to death in a pool of your own vomit.
The Governor must have had some time to hone his political philosophy during those long, lonely nights in the doghouse. He quotes from  The Fountainhead:

Representing himself, Roark pleads, in characteristically Randian terms: "I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need … I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society."

Right on. Spoken like a man who can fill his own teeth, change his own tires, and give himself a colonoscopy while cooking a bitching quail egg omelet on his custom made solar stove. C'mon, I know this gives all those Libertarians living in Mom and Dad's basement a little chub, but if  you're going to blow up your own shed because your wife hung the wrong color curtains in it, they're going to take you away. And well they should.

The Governor goes on:

Cold though they sound, these words contain two basic truths. First, an individual can achieve great things without governmental benevolence, and second, one man has no right to another's achievement. These are lessons we should all remember today, when each week is seemingly marked by another government program designed to fix society.

The Governor is full of shit. More conservative fever dreams of an America that never was. What? No taxes? No collective societal efforts to build roads, provide water, or drain away the shit? Our hardy pioneer forefathers were always screaming for the government to bail them out of some jam or another - fight the Indians - build a railroad - the roads are too muddy - my kids are dying of Cholera. Whiners. It's only government benevolence when someone else is receiving it and if one man's "achievement" is based on child labor in a sweatshop or slave labor, well I guess that's just too bad. Sometimes society needs fixing

Still Here?

Me too. Another Rapture has come and gone and not only are we not perfect, we're not even forgiven. The Lord's Universal Spam Filter has kicked us out once again. Me, I'm gonna amp up my sinning, at least for the winter months. I don't want to accidentally fall into a state of grace and get Raptured up into that cold January air, leaving my clothes and fillings behind. I can just hear those Left Behind losers laughing as me and my shrunken willy are wafted into the stratosphere. It wouldn't be worth it.

What If They Gave A Rapture And Nobody Came?

So you missed it.  Or maybe not. The godless may scoff and point to another failure of Biblical prophesy. I know better. Not only did the Rapture happen on September 23, it's going to happen again on October 20. It is a matter of Biblical history that the Rapture has occurred every month since 33 AD. Kind of God's monthlies. You don't see people ascending to heaven, leaving their clothes behind on a monthly basis for one simple reason. No one is worthy and no one is saved. Not the Catholics or the Jews or the Mormons or the Lutherans or the Pentacostals or the Hindus or the Atheists. Not nobody. You're all a bunch of sinners and none of you can get it right. So the Lord is going to keep Rapturing till you figure it all out. As for the Tribulation? C'mon, take a look around you.

The World's Worst Catholic™ Explains the Church's Position

                         It's missionary. And don't enjoy it. And whatever you do, don't wear a raincoat.

                Although I may not really be the World's Worst Catholic™, (I sure there are a few priests who out-worst me), it's my trademark and I'm sticking to it. It doesn't help that the Church's position on birth control, abortion, captital punishment, embryonic stem cell research and war is so convoluted as to give even Jesuit apologists a headache, I'll take a stab at hashing it out. This latest survey from Guttmacher Institute further muddies the waters. According to this study the legality of abortion has little to do with whether women seek out abortions. It has a lot to do with how many die from botched abortions, approximately 70,000 per year. Worldwide the number of abortions have fallen from 45.5 million in 1995 to 41.4 million in 2003. It is doubtful that this is due to countries passing more restrictive abortion laws, only three have done so, but it may well be correlated to increased use of birth control, especially in areas such as sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America where abortion is highly restricted. Now the Church, having lurched far to the right, has been careful to differentiate innocent life, which includes the unborn and terminally unconcious, from the rest of us. While Catholic politicians (and voters) have communion withheld and are threatened with excommunication for supporting abortion rights it appears to be a lesser sin to pull the plug on a condemned criminal and no sin at all to rain death on civilians from the skies during wartime, whatever side you happen to be on. My dad talks about mass dispensations before particularly nasty raids over Europe during the war. You were covered for what you did and what you were about to do. But that's always been a tricky moral dilemna, solved only by the Mennonites and Quakers. Nobody has ever accused the Catholic church of evidence based anything but the continued fight against contraception is particularly troubling. And contradictory. Of course, as Scranton's Bishop Martino found, American Catholics are going to do what they're going to do anyway. Particularly regarding birth control.  Now I perfectly understand how abortion can be seen to be tragic, maybe even murder, but I also believe that until the fetus is viable, it more a part of the woman's body then an independent human and it is her choice whether to carry the pregnancy to term. And under no circumstances should a women be forced to bear a child having severe birth defects or conceived as a result of rape or incest. The tragic part is that most abortion is unnecessary and the Catholic Church plays a large part in the fact that, per capita, catholic women are more likely to get an abortion than protestant women. Probably because of its Medieval stand on birth control. You think the Church could take a hint. For once.

You Would

Admit it. A little blush, a lot of Nair, a push up bra and a bikini wax or two. C'mon, you know you would. I'm not the only one.

4.4 million year old Ardi or Ardipithicus ramidus drives another nail in the coffin of Intelligent Design creationism. The Ark is getting pretty crowded. What is interesting to me is that some of the chimp like characteristics that we have always assumed belonged to the common ancestor may have evolved in chimps after the split. If that translates to behavior we may be less ape like than is generally believed. You can get the real skinny at John Hawks Weblog and Laelaps. If you prefer your science faux with a dash of stupidity here's Casey Luskin's take on the whole thing. The release of this information was 15 years in the making. About the same amount of time the Discovery Institute has been in existence. Hmmm. Fifteen years, multiple papers from one team of scientists for just one fossil on the one hand and absolutely nothing worthwhile out of the echo chamber that is the Discovery Institute on the other.