How About Silence?

 

I spent some time recently in a couple of waiting rooms.  Blaring away was the ubiquitous television.  One happened to be ‘The Price Is Right’ – annoying when watching, unbearable when used as a ‘background sound.’  In the other some nit-wit blabbered away while a camera was trained on the door of an airplane from which ‘Yo-Mamma Obama’ was supposed to appear at any moment.  As long as I could stand to look, nothing happened, and the voice stumbled around for time killing, thought mostly meaningless, words.

We live in a world full of constant media sounds.  Every restaurant must play music, often far too loudly.  Who just sits quietly any more?  It is a nearly lost art.

On the college campus many students walk around with ears always ‘budding’ and somewhere in there the mp3 player blasting.  Yesterday at the local grocery store the store manager was trying to tell the ‘cart collection’ boy something.  She had to shout while about two feet from him because his ear buds were in place and, apparently, his music was echoing around in his (empty?) head.  Help must be hard to get these days!

Even at church we suffer from this condition.  You might think Christians would at some point take to heart the admonition, “Let all the earth keep silence before Him!”  If we do, it’s not places I attend church.  There is always noise – on purpose.

We play music before the official ‘show’ begins.  Even during communion, we can’t just be quiet – we play ‘background’ music every and always.

I know this is not, perhaps, some great problem.  But I do often wonder why moderns cannot stand the sounds of silence – and I don’t mean the song by that title.  What goes on within us that we cannot tolerate being alone with our thoughts for even a short time?  Are we empty?  Do we hate what we find within?

I will now be silent so you can think about this for a while.  Try doing it without music playing.

Hot, Cold, or Inbetween – It’s Global Warming!

 

This AP story is making the rounds recently:

River Ice Jams Hard To Predict, Scientists Say
Mar 27, 2009 6:31 PM

[The story reports that]  Kate White, a civil engineer at the Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H., and one of the nation's leading experts on ice jams [said] climate change caused by global warming likely is changing ice conditions and adding to the unpredictability.

Kent comments:

This has been said before, but is worth repeating in light of a flood (take it as a pun if you wish) of this kind of reporting for the last far too many years.

First, a civil engineer is cited as though she is an expert on ‘global warming.’  The problems with that are obvious.  Even worse is the role the ‘global warming’ hypothesis is now expected to carry in the news culture.

On very hot days, global warming is always now the culprit.  It’s never just summer, when it is often hot in many places in the world.  Hot summer days confirm, it is always implied, the global warming hypothesis.

But, paradoxically, so do cold spells.  So does an ice jam in a river.  So does any storm of any kind.  So does some vegetation growing faster than usual.  So does EVERYTHING.

While that is all considered good reporting down at AP and their kin, it isn’t science.  An hypothesis which is confirmed by any evidence we might encounter is not much good as an hypothesis.  It’s as though the suspect in a who-done-it plot is shown to be guilty because she owned the gun or because she didn’t own the gun; because she was at the scene of the crime or because she had never been near the scene of the crime.  In other words, the evidence doesn’t matter, she’s just guilty.

If nothing can conceivably count against the hypothesis of global warming, nothing really counts for it, either.  We just know its a big, bad problem that must be solved by any means whatsoever.

All of which makes it a lot more like superstition than science.

Vote FOR LIGHT!

This just in from “Vote! Earth”

THIS IS THE WORLD’S FIRST GLOBAL ELECTION, BETWEEN EARTH AND GLOBAL WARMING.

On March 28 you can VOTE EARTH by switching off your lights for one hour.
Or you can vote global warming by leaving your lights on.

The results of the election are being presented at the Global Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen 2009. We want one billion votes for Earth, to tell world leaders that we have to take action against global warming.

According to these people, ‘Your Light Switch Is Your Vote.’

I will not review the fallacies of environmental-mania here.  You can find some of that elsewhere.

But I do plan to vote.  I plan to vote for more light, more power generation, and fewer ‘environmental’ nitwits.  Here is what I plan to do.

This Saturday (March 28) at 8:30 pm we are going to light our house up until it glows.  When all is glowing, I am going to take a picture of a well-lighted house, and post it here and on Facebook.

And I am here also to campaign for your vote.  Vote for more power generation, more light, and fewer ‘environmental’ nitwits by lighting up your place on Saturday at 8:30 pm, taking your picture, and posting it on a Facebook group that I am going to create right now.

The environmental maniacs love darkness.  I urge you to love light.

This Saturday, VOTE FOR LIGHT!!!

Amen.

Everyone, Anyone, & Their Kin

‘Ain’t it the truth?’

Today we set aside theology and all that for another kind of complaint:  the way supposedly smart people use the English language.

Yes, yes, I know that not every occasion calls for formal English.  In conversations we often bend the rules.

But in public speaking, in written public announcements, and in related venues, I expect to see some attempt to use the language correctly.  We are in the midst of a severe pronoun misuse problem lately.

So, Americans, get this through your thick skulls:  the words ‘everyone’, ‘someone’, ‘anyone’ (and a few others related words) are singular, not plural, in number.

This means that if you want to connect any of these words to another pronoun, it too must be singular.

Here is the sort of mistake that has become common:  “Everyone can pick up their copy of the book at the door.”  It is clear to most people that ‘their’ is plural – plural possessive, in fact.  But it should also be clear that ‘everyone’ is not plural.  You can do a little experiment to convince yourself.

Would you say ‘Everyone is going to the store.’ or ‘Everyone are going to the store.’?  The second way sounds wrong, and it is, because ‘everyone’ is singular.

But, maddeningly, one constantly hears and reads in the public forum things like, “Anyone can can cash their check at our bank for free.”

Why is this mistake so common?  It has to do with the inane views of feminism.  What should be said is, “Anyone can cash his check at our bank for free.”  Sometime in the last twenty-five years feminists convinced us all that this is a sin, because ‘his’ is masculine in grammatical gender.  It was contorted into an insult to use good grammar in this way.

People tried things like ‘his or her’ and ‘his/her’ but these were too awkward.  So rather than rub the feminist sensibilities in the wrong way, we have resorted to perverting the English language.

Yes, this is yet another one of the many benefits of feminism:  bad grammar.

Real Communists Ought to Know

Just in case any doubt remains in your mind, you might want to check out the speech given by the chairman of the Communist Party USA upon the election of Barack Obama.  It concludes with this:

Let me finish by saying that it sure feels good to be on the winning side. I’m sure everyone feels the same way. At the same time, because of this historic victory, we – and the broader movement that we are a part of – have our work cut out for us in the coming years. It’s a big challenge, but we have met other challenges. So let’s go out there and do it with a sense of confidence that the best days for our country lay ahead of us. Yes we can! Si Se Puede! Thank you.

Before someone starts complaining that ‘you can’t blame Obama for what someone says about him’ I want to make it clear that this is not my point.

The point is that real communists think the election of Obama is a good thing.  They think he will in some way help move their agenda forward.

And real communists ought to be a credible source for what is good for communism.  The chairman of the Communist Party USA says, “Obama is.”

The Maddening Modesty of Postmodernism

I have recently been reading Te Deum:  The Church and Music by Paul Westermeyer (Augsburg Fortress, 1998).  It is an intriguing textbook-ish (I don’t count that as necessarily a bad thing) treatment of church music across the ages, with a focus on the western church.

Early in the book, in his consideration of the influence of Psalms in church music, Westermeyer says:

Underneath this whole discussion of the Psalms has been an implicit sense that for Christians they are related to Christ.

Notice the hint of retraction here:  the Psalms are related to Christ ‘for Christians.’  As if this were not enough, Westermeyer adds this footnote:

This does no disservice to the Jews who use the Psalms in their own (sometimes messianic) way.  It simply is the way Christians interpret things, especially the Psalms.

As politically correct as this may be, it leaves one wondering:  are the Psalms related to Jesus the Christ, or not?  Or are things only related if someone relates them?  (This would be the ultimate in relationship subjectivity.)

I must conclude the Westermeyer thinks the Psalms are related to Christ, but he thinks that relationship exists only because he invented it for himself.  So then, in fact, are the Psalms related to Christ?  Apparently Westermeyer does not think such a factual relationship is knowable, even if it should exist.

But the footnote continues:

We live together best if we acknowledge honestly our own position, fully aware that others may not share it and that we have no business trying to force it on others.

And there you have it:  that soul-griping, post-modern relativism that has overcome our ability to think, all in the name of ‘sensitivity.’

I appreciate the call to honesty, but Westermeyer and his kin should go further in their honesty.  Because, honestly, if matters like the connection of Christ to the Psalms (and a whole host of other matters) are simply things we invent for ourselves, why do they even matter?

If the Psalms are in fact related to Christ, how does my mention of it ‘force’ it on anyone?  Can’t the Jews – or anyone else – simply be wrong sometimes?  Why can’t we just say, “The Psalms are related to Christ.  Non-Christian Jews, of course, don’t recognize this.”?

This in no way ‘forces’ anything on anyone.  Except that it does, perhaps, force those like Westermeyer to think more about reality and our ability to know it.  Because if everything that someone might dispute is simply an invention of our minds, why ever write a book?  Why ever be a Christian?

Rush Is Right

 

In a recent Washington Post article Kathleen Parker weighed in on the recent ‘Rush Limbaugh wants Obama to fail’ debate.  The key paragraph in what she said was this:

Where Limbaugh wants to slash and burn, Romney wants to build and repair. Where Limbaugh wants Obama to fail, Romney wants "our country to succeed, no matter who's in power. We want America to be prosperous and secure, regardless of who gets the credit ..... in good times and bad, the interests of this great nation come first."

But I have to agree with Rush on this one.  And I have to think that Kathleen Parker is being a bit disingenuous in her attack on Rush.

Romney wants our country to succeed.  But so does Rush, and I think Parker probably knows this, or she should if she pays attention to what Rush actually says on the topic.

Rush realizes that Obama’s current policies will work to the detriment of the United States – unless, that is, your goal is economic fascism of some kind.

Rush doesn’t care ‘who gets the credit’ – he is simply a freedom-loving anti-socialist who is, necessarily, opposed to socialism-creating policies.

While I can’t speak for Rush, I am quite sure that if Mr. Obama would advocate individual property and freedom respecting policies, he would receive nothing but praise and adoration from Rush Limbaugh.

Like Rush Limbaugh, I want Obama to fail, in the sense of failing to implement destructive policy.  I want him to fail for the same reasons (and I am not making a total equation here, just an analogy) – for the same kind of reasons I wish the policies of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao would have failed.

What is this so hard for people like Kathleen Parker to understand?