Saturday, February 23, 2008

18* - 1

Best Super Bowl (since 1985). What a great comeuppance for those cheaters.



It doesn't even matter that they "won" 18 games -- those "wins" are tainted too.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Blog Free Vacation

I'll be on vacation until March 3rd -- no blogging till then.

Leaving here
late winter snow 030202

Going here !! :-)
chilling on ave maria island

Saturday, February 09, 2008

Sure Puts Things in Perspective

LifeSiteNews.com

Friday January 25, 2008

Mother Refused Cancer Treatment So Baby Could live

By Thaddeus M. Baklinski

NORFOLK, UK, January 25, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Lorraine Allard of St. Olaves, near Great Yarmouth, was told she had advanced liver cancer when she was four months pregnant with her first son.

The thirty-three year old mother of three girls was advised to abort her son, who was 23 weeks old, and begin chemotherapy right away. Rather than follow the doctor's advice, however, the courageous woman insisted on waiting long enough to give her unborn son a chance to survive, telling her husband, Martyn: "If I am going to die, my baby is going to live."

Mrs. Allard was scheduled for a caesarian delivery at 26 weeks, but went into premature labour and delivered her son, Liam, on November 18.

"He was so tiny, just 1lb 11oz, so the nurse grabbed him and allowed Lorraine to give him a little kiss before he was taken to an incubator," Mr. Allard said in a report by the Daily Mail.

"She was so emotional. She had been so determined to give him the best chance and was happy that he had been born naturally, which meant she wouldn't have to recover for a couple of weeks after a Caesarian before beginning the chemotherapy."

She began a course of chemotherapy and, although the doctors had said the cancer was no longer curable, they hoped to shrink the tumours, which they thought might give her a few more years of life. A CT scan on January 17, however, revealed the tumours were still growing. She passed away the following day.

Martyn Allard shared the last moments of his wife's earthly life with the Daily Mail reporter: "On the day Lorraine died she hadn't eaten for two weeks and couldn't drink. I lay beside her and she was gripping my hand quite tight. We were like that for about half an hour."

"I could feel against my chest that her heart was slowing down. She just slipped away after that. It was very peaceful."

"Lorraine was positive all the way through. She had strength for both of us. I can't begin to describe how brave she was. Towards the end we knew things weren't going well but she was overjoyed that she had given life to Liam."

"When Liam is old enough, I won't tell him that Lorraine gave her life for him but I will say she made sure he had a good chance of life. She told me she didn't want him to feel bad about it," Mr. Allard added.

Lorraine's funeral will take place on February 4th in the same church where she married Martyn.




(c) Copyright: LifeSiteNews.com. Permission to republish is granted (with limitation*) but acknowledgement of source is *REQUIRED* (use LifeSiteNews.com).
"the programs I hoped would produce a kind of heaven ... ended up producing something much more like hell."

One of the great ironies, and tragedies, of liberalism is that, all too often, the grandiose programs they roll out do more harm than good; they exacerbate the problems they were created to solve. Welfare is one example. Its noble intention was to give folks a helping hand as they struggled to lift themselves up out of poverty. Instead, welfare helped to create a permanent underclass of people who grew dependent on government handouts.

Here is an interesting article in The American by Michael Barone on his experience as an idealistic young liberal working as an intern in Detroit back in the tumuluous 60s.

Present at the Destruction

From the January/February 2008 Issue

MICHAEL BARONE tells the eyewitness story of the 1967 riot: how programs that were supposed to create a heaven turned Detroit into a hell.

Present at the DestructionDean Acheson, who was President Truman’s secretary of state, wrote a memoir in 1969 titled Present at the Creation—the cre­ation of the Marshall Plan, the NATO alliance, and other initiatives at the begin­ning of the Cold War. In that same spirit, I can proclaim that I was present at the destruction—the destruction of much of the city of Detroit.

In Acheson’s case, what was created was the postwar Western alliance that waged the Cold War for 40 years to victory. In my case, what was destroyed was a great city, once the fourth-larg­est in the United States, in a long and drawn-out process over the next 40 years. Acheson was writ­ing about the years he served at the top of the State Department. I am writing about my intern­ship in the mayor’s office during the summer of 1967, the summer when Detroit suffered the most damaging urban riot in American history.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Jerome Cavanagh was elected mayor in 1961 at age 33 with near-unanimous support from the city’s black vot­ers and was reelected by a wide margin in 1965. He started ambitious poverty programs, set up a civil­ian complaint bureau in the police department, and brought in $360 million in federal money. He was bright and charming and, until he lost a Senate primary in 1966, seemed to have an unlimited political future. In 1965, I had written an article in The Harvard Crimson praising him for his liberal policies and contrasting them with the conserva­tive policies of Los Angeles Mayor Samuel Yorty, which I suggested were responsible for the Watts Riots. That got me an interview with Cavanagh and eventually the summer internship.

As I began work in June, I felt I was at the cutting edge of social change. City governments had long been providers of basic services such as water, gar­bage pickup, policing, and firefighting—humdrum stuff. Now city governments were overcoming pov­erty and providing opportunity for poor blacks to advance. Or so I thought. The mayor assigned me to spend one week at the city’s poverty pro­gram headquarters and to interview the heads of each program. That changed my thinking a little. Some of the officials appeared enthusiastic about what they were doing. But others, it seemed clear to me, had been dumped by their former agencies and were just marking time. Still, I remained con­fident, even as a major riot broke out in Newark, New Jersey, on July 12, that no civil disturbance like it would happen in Detroit. Newark’s mayor was a white hack politician, opposed by most local blacks. Detroit was different.

Not so. In the small hours of Sunday, July 23, Detroit police raided a “blind pig” (an after-hours bar) at 12th and Clairmount—about a mile from where my mother grew up. There were protests as police made arrests, but then people in the crowds started breaking windows, looting stores, and set­ting fires. The police, heavily outnumbered, made no efforts to stop them; Commissioner Ray Girardin felt that would only invite more violence.

White mayor Jerome Cavanagh was elected in 1961 at age 33 with near-unanimous support from the city’s black voters. He started ambitious poverty programs and brought in $360 million in federal money.

“A spirit of carefree nihilism was taking hold,” said the Kerner Commission Report, which was supposed to be the definitive statement on America’s urban unrest. It was an odd descrip­tion of what was going on. Firemen, unprotected by police, abandoned 100 city blocks. The loot­ing and arson continued during the day even as Representative John Conyers, then serving his sec­ond term in the House and now chairman of the Judiciary Committee, called on rioters to stop and as Cavanagh met with black leaders at police head­quarters at 1300 Beaubien (a building site familiar to readers of the crime novels of Elmore Leonard). I arrived at the City-County Building around noon and found my way into meetings. At one point Mayor Cavanagh asked me, fresh from my first year of law school, whether he had the power to declare a curfew. He ordered one at 7:45 p.m., and by 9:00 p.m. Governor George Romney had declared a state of public emergency.

I kept no diary, and my memories of the days and nights that followed are jumbled. State police were sent in by the early hours of Monday, and the National Guard was summoned from summer training camp 200 miles away. But as the looting, arson, and killing continued on Sunday night and Monday morning, it was plain that city and state police forces were too small to be effective and that the National Guard, with no riot training, was shooting off its weapons far too much. By noon Monday, President Lyndon Johnson had ordered troops to a nearby Air Force base. After a late after­noon tour of the city, Deputy Defense Secretary Cyrus Vance and General John Throckmorton decided the soldiers weren’t needed. But when darkness fell after 9:00 p.m. the rioting continued in full force, and by midnight the decision to deploy federal troops had been made. The Army wound up using much less firepower than the National Guard had—and it was far more effective.

I remember listening to the police radio in the commissioner’s office, probably on that night. A call came in that police were withdrawing from one square mile of the city, followed by a simi­lar call a few minutes later. I knew large parts of Detroit block by block: the neighborhoods where my relatives lived; the long avenues radiating out of downtown Detroit, lined with stores and churches and auto dealerships; the big auto factories well into town but on its periphery when they were built between 1905 and 1930. When my father used to take me with him on his Saturday hospital rounds, he would point out neighborhoods—whole square miles—that had been all white the year before and now were well on their way to becoming all black.

Riots occur when people think they can get away without punishment. That may not be ‘carefree nihilism’ but it’s also not ‘seeking fuller participation in the social order.’

When I got my driver’s license in 1960, I liked to drive around Detroit, exploring and seeing the effects of what we called neighborhood change. It didn’t occur to me then not to spend the evening in an art theater or a jazz club in what had become a black neighborhood. Now, I was in what was called the Command Center as large parts of the city were being looted and torched. As I drove home on the freeway in the daylight I could see smoke rising from the fires; at one stoplight I pulled up next to a tank.

The rioting continued on Tuesday and Wednesday, then ceased Thursday; it had gone on for five nights and much of the days in between. In all, 43 people were dead, 33 of them black; 7,200 people had been arrested. (At one point I was told to find 2,000 mattresses for prisoners; after much calling around, I got them from the Salvation Army, to which I contribute every year.) My initial reac­tion to the riot was that we needed to show that we could maintain basic order. The official response was different. Almost all political and civic lead­ers sought to understand the rioters’ grievances. The Kerner Commission Report, issued in 1968, pontificated, “What the rioters appeared to be seeking was fuller participation in the social order and the material benefits enjoyed by the majority of American citizens.” Certainly, blacks in Detroit had grievances: the residential segregation then universal in America was a disgrace, and the city’s police force was only 4 percent black. But I believe the rioters were making a different calculation. They knew about the riots in other cities, and they figured that if enough people started looting and firebombing, no one would stop them. Riots occur when people expect a riot to occur and think they can get away without punishment. That may not exactly be “carefree nihilism,” but it’s also not “seek­ing fuller participation in the social order.”

The riot set in motion decisions and actions that physically and spiritually destroyed much of the city over the next four decades. It sped the exodus of whites from the city to the suburbs north of Eight Mile Road; it staunched the flow of investment into the city; it led to a vast increase in crime. Coleman Young, Detroit’s mayor from 1973 to 1993, was blatantly hostile to whites and seemed entirely unperturbed by the city’s crime. Today when I drive in Detroit I see neighborhoods with burned-out, abandoned houses and empty lots once inhab­ited by middle-income homeowners. Detroit had 1,600,000 residents at the time of the riot. The lat­est Census estimate is about 919,000.

My political views have changed over those years, more because of what has happened to Detroit than anything else. In retrospect, it is plain that Detroit was as likely to have a riot as any other major city and that the programs I hoped would produce a kind of heaven in our central cities ended up producing something much more like hell. A more forceful response to the crowd outside the blind pig might have prevented the riot (as it prob­ably did, without much notice, in other cities), and a more rapid deployment of federal troops could have stopped it earlier (as happened in Los Angeles in 1992). But it’s not clear to me that we could have avoided the disastrous policy responses that were already in train in 1967: taking a more lenient view of urban crime and promoting greater wel­fare dependency among blacks. That was a wrong turn, but white America did have sins to answer for, and what seems to me now the more productive response—nurturing middle-class habits and edu­cational achievement among blacks—was a course white Americans felt too guilty to pursue. The peo­ple left in Detroit are still paying the price.

Michael Barone, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has been a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report for 17 years.

NEWSFLASH -- Hillary Announces Running Mate



How's that for a "winning ticket"!

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

He Epitomizes Excellence

Who? Who else -- Thomas Sowell

'Giving Back' Has Become Mindless Mantra

By THOMAS SOWELL | Posted Wednesday, November 07, 2007 4:30 PM PT

Among the many mindless mantras of our time, "making a difference" and "giving back" irritate me like chalk screeching across a blackboard.

I would be scared to death to "make a difference" in the way pilots fly airliners or brain surgeons operate. Any difference I might make could be fatal to many people.

Making a difference makes sense only if you are convinced you have mastered the subject at hand to the point where any difference you make would be for the better.

Very few people have mastered anything that well beyond their own circle of knowledge. Even fewer think far enough ahead to consider that question. Yet hardly a day goes by without news of some uninformed busybodies on one crusade or another.

Even simple acts have ramifications that spread across society the way waves spread across a pond when you drop in a stone.

Among those who make a difference by serving food to the homeless, how many have considered the history of societies that have made idleness easy for great numbers of people?

How many have studied the impact of drunken idlers on other people in their own society, including children who come across their needles in the park — if they dare to go to the parks?

How many have even considered such questions relevant as they drop their stone in the pond without thinking about the waves that spread out to others?

Maybe some would still do what they do, even if they thought about it. But that doesn't mean that thinking is a waste of time. "Giving back" is a similarly mindless mantra.

I have donated money, books and blood for people I have never seen and to whom I owe nothing. Nor is that unusual among Americans, who do more of this than anyone else. But we are not "giving back" anything to those people because we never took anything from them in the first place.

If we are giving back to society at large, in exchange for all that society has made possible for us, then that is a very different ballgame. Giving back in that sense means acknowledging an obligation to those who went before us and for the institutions and values that enable us to prosper today.

But there is very little of this spirit of gratitude and loyalty in many of those who urge us to "give back." Indeed, many who repeat the "giving back" mantra would sneer at any such notion as patriotism or any idea that the institutions and values of American society have accomplished worthy things and deserve their support.

Our educational system, from the schools to the universities, are actively undermining any sense of loyalty to the traditions, institutions and values of American society. They are not giving back anything except condemnation, often depicting sins common to the human race around the world as peculiar evils of "our society."

A classic example is slavery, which is repeatedly drummed into our heads — in the schools and in the media — as something unique done by white people to black people in the United States. The tragic fact is that, for thousands of years of recorded history, people of every race and color have been both slaves and enslavers.

Europeans enslaved on the Barbary Coast of North Africa were far more numerous than all the Africans brought to the U.S. and the 13 colonies from which it was formed.

What was unique about Western civilization was that it was the first civilization to turn against slavery, and that it stamped out slavery not only in its own societies but in other societies around the world during the era of Western imperialism.

That process took well over a century, because non-Western societies resisted. White people, as well as black people, were still being bought and sold as slaves, decades after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in the United States.

Those who want to "give back" should give back the truth. It is a debt that is long overdue.

Copyright 2007 Creators Syndicate, Inc


Saturday, February 02, 2008

Dear Abby

Dear Abby:

My husband is a liar and a cheat. He has cheated on me from the beginning, and when I confront him, he denies everything. What's worse, everyone knows he cheats on me. It is so humiliating. Also, since he left his job eight years ago he hasn't even looked for a new one. All he does is buy big cigars and cruise around and bullshit with his pals, while I have to work to pay the bills. Since our daughter went away to college he doesn't even pretend to like me and hints that I am a lesbian. What should I do?

Signed,
Clueless









Dear Clueless:
Grow up and dump him. For Pete's sake, you don't need him anymore. You're a United States Senator and presidential candiate. Act like it.

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