Category: culture Page 7 of 11

Don’t harsh my mellow

On Friday, August 7, 2015

Kelly at Mcmenamins Kelly and I are kindred spirits in that we regularly get accused of being overly enthusiastic. We talked on the phone about this very subject today. Overly enthusiastic. That is an oxymoron. One of the few really good things that came out of the 1960’s was the expression, “don’t harsh my mellow.” Precisely right. The bane to our existence are those who chose to curb their enthusiasm in a spirit deadening effort be cool, “in the know” or somehow superior to those who engaged in passionate behavior.

Those lukewarm souls who choose to act nonplussed about all things social are not only boring, but could very well be guilty of the attitude for which the Laodiceans were admonished in Revelation 3:14-17. Do not be lukewarm. Be passionate. Love life. Do not be relegated to that category of people who slouch through life throwing wet blankets on all joy.

Stick to your guns Kelly. Be enthusiastic. Be overly enthusiastic. The gnostics of buzzkill in no way have special knowledge about those things you know that animate your enthusiasm.

Betty Blonde #390 – 01/13/2010

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Linux and civilization

By Dad

On Wednesday, August 5, 2015

In culture, Software, Technology

Installing Linux The “scratch and dent” computer I bought from the Dell Outlet website with a discount coupon arrived today. I think I got a screamin’ deal. I bought it because I needed a Linux computer for some contract work I am doing in the evenings to get one of my old employers over the hump with a product they are trying to get out. So I spent most of yesterday evening loading all the tools I need to do the development onto the new computer. That included Xubuntu 14.04 LTS, Qt/Qt Creator, OpenCV (finally moving to version 3!), a subversion client, etc., etc. I needed to build OpenCV in a specific way required by the application so I did that, too.

The upshot to all this is that I needed to sit and wait for things to finish downloading, installing and building. During that time, I found a great article about three phases through which civilizations pass: Barbaric, Vigorous and Decadent. Here is the premise of the article titled A Tour of Our Decadent Civilization on the Sultan Knish blog:

It’s easy to find examples of barbaric and decadent civilizations. We can find all the barbaric civilizations to suit an entire faculty’s worth of anthropologists in the Middle East. And then back home we can see the decadent civilization that employs their kind to bemoan the West.

Vigorous is what America used to be when it was moving west, producing at record rates and becoming a world power. Decadent is what it is becoming.

Christian and I had an interesting talk about all this on the phone a couple of nights ago. The thing that amazes me is that the vast bulk of people in America do not get it. In our conversation we attributed it to the fact that most people under the age of 30 get their information from Reddit, Slashdot, Comedy Central and Huffington Post while people over 30 get their information from Facebook.

I think we are partially right. People buy into the pseudo-scholarship of Richard Dawkins, Bart Ehrman, Marcus Borg, Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris and the like who represent their false ideas based on personal agendas and/or ruminations way outside their fields of expertise. It makes its way into pop culture because it allows people license to live how they want in the moment rather than do the hard work and self denial based on morays driven by objective truth.

The conclusion of the matter is the same as it has always been. Our chunk of civilization in our time and place will wake up one way or the other. Unless there are changes, it will be a very rude awakening.

Betty Blonde #388 – 01/11/2010

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Objective truth

By Dad

On Thursday, July 30, 2015

In Christianity, culture, Family

Eating appetizers at McMenamins Wilsonville Our family discusses the subject of objective truth frequently. We have done so as a family for pretty close to a decade. As soon as the kids were old enough to understand the concept, we started to talk about it. The direction our culture is going is not friendly to those who want to live their lives in conformances to mandates placed on them by the objective reality of a Christian God. When the culture embraces the immorality of things like abortion, cohabitation outside of marriage and even the pursuit of fun in the form of sport, music, art and leisure at the expense of the pursuit of God and things God hates, lives get wasted and people suffer.

The hard part of this is that kids get beat up and ostracized culturally and socially as a result of their adherence to objective truth and the dictates it puts on their lives. Sometimes it is an active thing, but most of the time these kids get shuffled off to the side, ignored, derided and ridiculed. Some of us older people notice this. As children of the sixties, seventies and eighties, we went through it ourselves. The difference is that when we went through it, there were large swaths of culture who were on our side. I do not think that is true anymore. Culture is active in its derision of the good and of objective truth.

This is especially so in cities like Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Boston and New York, but I think it has even seeped down into strongholds of morality in places like North Carolina, Texas and Arizona. Kids with access to the Internet tend to give credence to what they read on Reddit and other venues that tend toward the sophomoric, but with a hard edge of aggressive hedonism. The sad part of it all is that what they read on Reddit is often reinforced by what they are taught in school by people trained at educational institutions saturated in the very same vacuous philosophical pablum that upholds relative morality.

It is a hard thing to swim against the tide. I wish I knew better how to encourage those who do so.

Betty Blonde #382 – 01/01/2010

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Am I an environmentalist wacko?

By Dad

On Sunday, July 19, 2015

In culture

Kelly visits the studio apartment Twice now, we have had five people around our table for dinner in our tiny studio apartment. Kelly and Christian have both stayed with us over the weekend a couple of times. All of that worked out really well. This weekend, our apartment manager came around to ask us if we wanted to extend our stay so we signed up for another six months. We do not really know where we will land next. We do not even know when we will be able to make the next changes. Alzheimer’s is like that.

What we do know is that we like to live a downsized existence. The apartment, in spite of its small size, works just great for us. We are close to shopping, work, school and restaurants. We can walk just about everywhere we normally need to go during the week. In addition to that, we have a small, economical car so we do not really use too much gas. Now I have been a good (conservative) Republican as long as I can remember, so I pretty much hate the environment, clean water, clean air and all that sort of thing. It pains me that we have such a small carbon footprint.

Even worse, the plans we have for the next place we get, wherever and whenever that is, have shrunk dramatically. We want to get a small house with as open a floor plan as possible and three small bedrooms, two of which have Murphy beds. What will people think? We are not planning to do this to save the environment–we actually like to live that way. I guess we can do the small stuff by letting people know our garden is definitely not organic and we use real pesticides. And of course we will have a gas burning über-stove. We will have to quit eating granola, too.

Well, these sacrifices are probably worth it. We do not want to lose our redneck friends or hang out with angsty, environmentalist hippie types, but we really like to live small.

Betty Blonde #374 – 12/22/2009

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The news, moral decay and the opportunity in all that

By Dad

On Monday, July 13, 2015

In Christianity, culture, Politics

It has been an interesting year. The veneer of good will between warring world views seems to have been ripped open. I ran into three interesting articles this morning when I opened up my browser to read the news. The first article, titled The end of “news” was about once trusted news sources that are no longer read by anyone but extreme partisans because they are no longer worthy of our trust. I found myself nodding my head to this article as I read. I no longer get my news from the AP, NBC, ABC, CBS, the Oregonian, The New York Times or even Fox News. I mourn that. I always loved to read the newspaper over coffee in the morning. The thing is, they no longer report the news. Other news sources break the important stories. I visited the old, reliable news source for a lot of years before I finally gave up. Now I just ignore them.

The second article titled Punch Leftists in the Mouth by Daniel Greenfield of the Sultan Knish blog about how to deal with those who want to tear society down. It is a rework of Mike Tyson, the heavyweight boxing champ’s famous quote, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Greenfield says it is not good to play nice with people who want to perpetrate evil. I found this interesting because James 4 was the chapter for my daily Bible read today.

Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God. –James 4:4

Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin. –James 4:17

The last article is a hopeful one. The title of the article is The Sexual Revolution’s Coming Refugee Crisis. The subtitle is Many people are going to be disappointed, and even before they can admit it to others or to themselves, they are going to ask, “Is this all there is?” It basically says that a lot of the bad stuff that has gained approval in our society since the 1960’s cannot sustain itself. God’s rules are being broken and things do not end well when that happens. Many people will come to the end of themselves and start to look for answers outside of popular culture, politics and governments. There is a huge opportunity in that if we remain humble and point these people to something truly good. James 4 has some answers for that, too.

Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up. –James 4:10

Betty Blonde #368 – 12/14/2009

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This marriage thing

By Dad

On Thursday, July 9, 2015

In Christianity, culture, Family, Politics

I have long been of the opinion that the government should not be engaged (no pun intended) in the marriage business. The problem with government meddling in affairs outside of their domain did not begin with the recent Supreme Court overstepping of its constitutional bounds here in the United States. It happened long before that. A guy named Matt Appling in an aptly titled blog post, If You Think the Supreme Court Just “Redefined” Marriage, Take It Up With King Henry the Eighth, really nails the issue. It is ironic that so many people interested in redefining marriage to include something that is not marriage (same sex unions) are calling out the Christian community on the divorce issue. This is something over which the Christian world has fought wars, divided and argued for centuries.

It is right to argue that Christian’s need to get their house in order when it comes to the issue of divorce, but it seem very disingenuous when it is argued by people who treat the institution of marriage (in the true sense of the word) in such a cavalier manner. Christians really need to get this issue right. People both inside the Christian community and out who dishonor marriage through unrepentant fornication, adultery and attempts to redefine it should be viewed with incredulity when they try to argue that Christians are hypocrites with respect to divorce. Some of us are, but some of us, even in our weakness and failure, continue to repent, live repentant lives and fight the good fight.

In the meantime government should get out of the marriage business.

Betty Blonde #365 – 12/09/2009

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Sweating the small stuff

By Dad

On Monday, June 29, 2015

In culture, Politics

The saying, “Don’t sweat the small stuff and it is all small stuff,” is one that resonates with me. There are big, important things for which all men are responsible, but we often get caught up in little stuff that really does not matter. Still, the steps taken by the judiciary in this country to facilitate evil requires a response from people of conscience.

A couple of days ago, Daniel Greenfield at the Sultan Knish blog wrote a post titled Be the Best Saboteur You Can Be about how, sometimes it is important to sweat the small stuff. When evil is perpetrated and no one in authority cares to do anything about it, the only thing poor schlubs like you and I can do is become saboteurs. Good saboteurs sweat the small stuff. In the article, Greenfield lists five things we can do. Here is part of point number two from his list which is my favorite:

2. Fight the small stuff

You don’t have to think in terms of a national movement. You don’t even have to think in terms of an organization. Those are things that we need, but you can fight the left in small ways at home.

I’m not talking about Sign X or donate to Y.

Just obstruct any liberal initiative, policy or program in your community. It doesn’t matter what. It doesn’t matter if it’s innocuous. It doesn’t matter if you agree with it.

Undermine it on principle. If you can, vote it down. Encourage others to vote it down. If you can’t, look for ways to tie it in red tape by attaching other agendas to it.

The left wins its biggest victories at the planning stage. Its activists come early and stay late. They propose their plans, rig meetings, use kids and the elderly as human shields, and get their way. They are not used to any real opposition. Particularly the kind that doesn’t bluster, but finds ways to tie their proposals in knots, to make them expensive and drag them out as long as possible.

Oppose them when you can. Concern troll them when you can’t.

If you don’t have that kind of position, think of the origins of the term ‘sabotage’. Workers threw their shoes into machines and stopped the machine. Don’t do anything illegal. Don’t do anything that will get you fired.

But if you have the opportunity to make a liberal program work badly, if you have a legal way to put more stress on it, to tie up the energy and time of the people running it, to make it worse… do it.

We’re the underdogs. We’re the political guerrillas. This is not our system. It’s their system.

Our job is to make it run as badly as possible.

I love that. “This is not our system. It’s their system. Our job is to make it run as badly as possible.” Evil is afoot. We have the high ground if we take it. Truth and history are on our side. There is neither a moral nor intellectual case for setting the course that has been set. Our job is to reject what has been forced on us. There is a great, even eternal cost for not resisting evil and quite probably a huge temporal cost if we do resist evil. It is worth it to resist evil. We already know the outcome of this story, that we win in the end.

Betty Blonde #357 – 11/27/2009

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Orthodox Christianity vs. the Supreme Court

By Dad

On Sunday, June 28, 2015

In Christianity, culture, Politics

The New York Times, as the old saying goes, is like a broken clock. Even a broken clock is right two times per day. NPR and Time Magazine do not seem to be right quite that often. In fact, I had kind of relegated them both to the same category as purely naturalistic evolution–their chance of getting anything right is about equal to the mythical chance of a tornado assembling a Boeing 747 as it passes through a junk yard or a million monkeys typing at a million typewriters for a million years to duplicate a work of Shakespeare.

I still think NPR is in that category, but imagine my surprise when an article appeared in Time Magazine that perfectly articulated my thoughts on where we stand here in America now that the Constitution has no fixed meaning and can be modified on any whim of the masses. I am not one of those who believes the court’s latest indignity was done on the whim of five out of nine justices. If society was against them, the Supreme Court could in no way make these kinds of changes.

Society at large now defines “marriage” differently than those who hold to orthodox Christian beliefs. Christian, my son, made the statement that this is nothing new, society has been like this for as long as he can remember. Thankfully, his living memory is not that long–less than twenty years. Still, this did not all start with attempts to change the definition of marriage to accommodate homosexuality, but with some equally pernicious evils: the libertine sexual morays of the 1960’s and the acceptance of divorce with neither societal nor legal sanction and diminishing sanction by much of the church. Rod Dreher, the author of the article expresses my feelings about this very well:

…social and religious conservatives must recognize that the Obergefell decision did not come from nowhere. It is the logical result of the Sexual Revolution, which valorized erotic liberty. It has been widely and correctly observed that heterosexuals began to devalue marriage long before same-sex marriage became an issue. The individualism at the heart of contemporary American culture is at the core of Obergefell — and at the core of modern American life.

This is profoundly incompatible with orthodox Christianity. But it is also the world we live in today. Dreher goes on to describe the ramifications of all this for professing Christians and how times could get even uglier, but that it has happened before. It is scriptural that evil will ascend before the end. One of these times, when evil is ascending Christ will return. Whether this is that time, only time will tell.

In the meantime, I will consider reading Time Magazine again in a million years or so.

Betty Blonde #356 – 11/26/2009

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An infinite number of mathematicians

By Dad

On Thursday, June 25, 2015

In culture

The joke going around work*:

An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar.

The first one says, “Give me a beer.”

The second one says, “Give me half a beer.”

The third one says, “Give me a quarter of a beer.”

The bartender pours two beers, slaps them onto the bar and says, “You guys should know your limits.”

Update: It does not get any funnier than this–the math in the joke explained with a straight face.

*I know, I know. It is old and not that funny. The thing is I love that joke.

Public campaign for Kelly to start drawing again

By Dad

On Thursday, June 25, 2015

In Art, culture, Education

One of the great joys of this blog when the kids were in their undergraduate degrees was the reports they brought to us about happenings during class surrounding certain of their ultra-politically correct professors. Sometimes, even usually, they arrived via text messages from their phones in real-time. When I started writing about those events, Kelly drew me a Commie Professor logo to go with those blog posts.

I am quite happy to say this is all happening again in Kelly’s grad school experience. Good grief, she lives in SEATTLE, a veritable hotbed of anarchism and histrionic coffee house emotings. It is as close as one can get to Portlandia without actually being in Portland, but with the potential for anarchist rioting. The purpose of this post is to serve as a public shaming of Kelly to get her to illustrate and describe her encounters in the coffee shops, classrooms, conferences and gala events she attends so that this momentous time of her life as a grad student can be documented properly. She has committed to this and now it is time to put up.

The difference between graduate school experiences between Kelly and Christian (down in Tempe) is fairly stark. Part of that might have to do with the differences in the cultures of the schools. I think the bigger difference is between the nature of the material they are studying. Kelly’s anecdotes about school tend toward the absurd–almost like during her undergraduate degree. Christian has lots of anecdotes that are equally as interesting, but in a completely different way.

Serious is not the right word to describe what I think when Christian talks about his school and his work although the what he does definitely falls into that category. The work is so cerebrally intense that I do not think the people in his program have much time for consideration of much out of their academic domain. It is just very, very interesting. It is not just the work he and his compatriots do. It is also their interactions.

The difficulty of the material, the personalities and wide ranging cultures (different parts of the US, India, China, etc.), the research sponsors from important laboratories, think tanks, universities and industry, the frantic and frenetic race to understand insanely difficult problems before someone else with an off the charts IQ and an insane work ethic beats you to it–all of that is just jaw droppingly interesting. What these people do is beyond the boundaries of my understanding. In Christian’s case, it is down in the bowels of very hard math guided by his professor who just became a Fellow of the IEEE and is associated with all the luminaries in his areas of research. I am trying to figure out how to write about this in a compelling way to describe the extremely fascinating daily workings of Christian’s degree, but I might not ever be able to do it adequately. I will try if I get it figured out.

In the meantime, I am going to keep browbeating Kelly with continued public shamings until she starts sending me some illustrations and anecdotes I can publish here.

Betty Blonde #354 – 11/24/2009

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Insider information and judging justly

By Dad

On Wednesday, June 24, 2015

In culture, Politics

I traded a couple of emails the other day with a buddy who had some insider information about some events in the news. The news was reported in a very skewed way by the main stream media which made people in the middle and toward the right of the political spectrum howl. The insider information, and I trust the guy who gave it to me, led me to believe both sides had some points right and some points wrong, but mostly they missed the bigger point altogether. All this made me think about a blog post I wrote a few days ago titled Sometimes it seems like things are getting really bad. That post referenced an article that explains that, even though morality is in decline, there are literally two billion people who hold to what is right.

The backdrop for this was some discussions with the kids about how important it is to figure out what is true for one’s self. If someone makes a statement about the way another person thinks, acts or their very nature, it is best to take it with a grain of salt until it can be known first hand. No one has all the information and people change. I am still embarrassed (and ashamed, if the truth were known) about stuff in my past. There are a few people who know some of that stuff about me, but are willing to be my friends anyway. And the reality is that I have changed. I am different both in terms of values, priorities and discipline than when I was seventeen. I am glad for those who give me credit for that. It is good to give other people credit for the positive changes in their lives, too, and not base judgments on imperfect, incomplete and false second hand reports. We are probably missing the bigger point altogether anyway.

Betty Blonde #353 – 11/23/2009

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Perfidious anti-Israel bias in the news

By Dad

On Thursday, June 18, 2015

In culture, Politics

I received an instant message from Christian yesterday about an article posted on Yahoo News. The headline in big bold letters said:

Israel army kills West Bank Palestinian: Palestinian security

In his instant message Christian said, “Pay special attention to the 3rd paragraph.” The third paragraph says the following:

An army spokesman told AFP that a Palestinian had died after he threw an incendiary device at a jeep and the vehicle overturned on him.

How is that for unbiased reporting? Bury the lead and pump the politically correct version in the headline. That’s the way to do it. About a week and a half ago a great article came out in The Alegmeiner titled Israel’s Supports Must Stop Using These 13 Phrases. Among other things, it explains why it is wrong to refer to Samaria and Judea as the “West Bank” and how the use of the terms “East Jerusalem” or “traditional Arab East Jerusalem” is just wrong, too–“The 19 years between when invading Jordan captured part of the city in 1948 and was ousted by Israel in 1967 was the only time in history, except between 638 and 1099, when Arabs ruled any part of Jerusalem.”

The article is a succinct primer on how much of the media tries to force the narrative a certain politically correct direction when it comes to reporting on Israel.

Betty Blonde #349 – 11/17/2009

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Can you have blue eyes and be Mexican?

By Dad

On Sunday, June 14, 2015

In culture, Politics

Blue-eyed Mexican girl I LOVE Sarah Palin. The following is from her Facebook post about Rachel Dolezal, the white chick who claimed to be black so she could get a good job in the NAACP and the other white chick who claimed she was “native American,” so she could get a good job as a professor at a politically correct university. This is almost a perfect storm. It is old now, but the meme going around the internet right now that goes “An Indian and an African walk into a bar… Just joking, it’s just two liberal white women” really IS funny. Here is part of what Palin said:

Ok, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t laugh… this hard. I know this isn’t a victimless crime, what this white chick perpetrated. But it’s a most crystal clear picture of so many screwed up things we’ve let society adopt as the norm. Namely, the practice nowadays of judging someone not based on character, but on skin color. Our original civil rights freedom fighters are rolling in their graves over the backward steps we’ve taken lately. It’s politically incorrect to call out Elizabeth Warren for falsely claiming she’s American Indian, or dinging Obama for just making up his former multi-ethnic girlfriend, and I guarantee I’ll be branded a racist for laughing at this Rachel Dolezal story. Whatever. Dolezal is an unsatisfied lily white leftist who believes the only thing less politically correct than being a white girl is to be a white guy today.

Kelly is the blue-eyed Mexican girl in our family. The funny deal is that the Mexican side of the family has as many or more blue-eyed, light-skinned people as my lily-white, Anglo-Finnish side of the family. Her first language is Spanish and her mother’s family has been in Mexico for centuries. She has actually gotten called out on here racial insensitivity toward Mexicans by white women at school on a semi-regular basis. One of my favorites was when a girl got offended and told Kelly off because she was not offended by some cafeteria workers wearing sombreros and fake mustaches on Cinco de Mayo. Kelly embraces the affirmative celebration of all things Mexican. How can you not love sombreros and fake mustaches on Cinco de Mayo.

The jokes about these posers are a ton of fun. The subjects of derision could not be more worthy.

Update: Lorena just sent another hilarious one: Click here.

Update II: Found this link to the sombrero and mustache incident (described above). Great fun was had by all!

Update III: This just in from our favorite government school teacher, (lily white) Trisha via text message:

I am thinking about going back to college… I think I can afford it if I claim trans-race. I don’t look it, but I feel Mexican! Affirmative Action and all that. I thought I might claim some imaginery children as dependents…because, although I don’t have children, I fell like I do! I am working on making some salsa and getting a tan! Thoughts?

Trisha, this is a slam-dunk! You are blood related to Mexicans! You EAT salsa and some people you know have kids! You are in with the win!

Betty Blonde #346 – 11/12/2009

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Biscuits and gravy, trains, and a visit from Kelly

By Dad

On Friday, June 12, 2015

In Cooking, culture

Pam's Farmhouse (Raleigh) menu Pam's Farmhouse (Raleigh) biscuits and gravy I think my buddy, Troy, sent me these images just to torture me. We regularly met at Pam’s Farmhouse in Raleigh on Saturday mornings before we went into the lab to work on the GaugeCam project at NCSU a few years back. Very high on the long list of benefits of living in Raleigh is the stellar quality of the biscuits and gravy generally available in the South and the very specific benefits of Pam’s Farmhouse Restaurant where they only take cash, they serve their iced tea in Mason jars and the waitresses call you “Hon.” There might be a place here in Oregon that does biscuits and gravy right, but we have not found it yet.

Kelly goes back to University of Washington

That little bit of nostalgia was the latest in a series over the last couple of days. The anniversary of Lorena’s father’s death was a big part of it, but Kelly’s visit on the train got me to thinking about the several momentous train trips I had taken–A trip to Klamath Falls from Albany to visit cousin Merle when the kids were little (we saw a herd of elk a couple of feet from the train while moving slowly up a steep grade) and a trip from Portland to Idaho where I met a Catholic priest who became a lifelong friend.

I had completely forgotten about a great train trip my buddy Curt N. and I took from Boise to Denver on the train to visit our friend Karen K. That was one of two trips Curt and I took together to visit Karen, but the second one was a New Years eve trip to Seattle. Both trips were momentous high marks of my (relative) youth. The thing that triggered the memory of this trip was Karen K’s comment on the tribute post to Grandpa Lauro. I was so happy to see Kelly is maintaining the family tradition as is just as inspired as us about the train. It really is a great way to travel and all this brought a tear to my eye (especially the part about the biscuits and gravy)!

Betty Blonde #344 – 11/10/2009

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Research on how to be happy

By Dad

On Tuesday, June 9, 2015

In Christianity, culture

I laughed when I saw this article on research about happiness. Here is a couple of quotes from the article that tell the story:

“If you lead your life always waiting for a great thing to happen, you probably will be unhappy,” Tamerin said.

“You can choose to live focusing on what is not right in your life,” Dr. Sood said.

And perhaps one of the biggest hindrances to being happy is too much thinking about one’s self, research shows.

“Complainers are never going to be happy,” Ketchian said. “Happiness is a decision.”

I think this research was already in at least a couple of millennia ago. Not surprisingly, there was nothing in the article about holding to a Christian worldview to help facilitate these kinds of behaviors and attitudes.

Betty Blonde #341 – 11/05/2009

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Pride goeth before a fall

By Dad

On Wednesday, June 3, 2015

In culture

I found an email note from my South American friend Jon in my inbox when I woke up this morning. It was about this article in the New York Times*. The article is about the resignation and apparent fall from grace of an old guy (79 years at this writing), Sepp Blatter who has, in the words of the Times, “run FIFA like a dictator for the past 17 years.” FIFA being the regulatory body that runs the (soccer) World Cup. It kind of gives me joy that I have to explain that this World Cup is the World Cup of soccer because a good chunk of the people who read this blog might not know that. We Americans do have one or two things right.

I have been thinking about it ever since. I think the condition of my elder father with Alzheimer’s has gotten me to thinking about how I am going to be if and when I get old and start losing my filters. The preeminent thought in my mind is “there but for the grace of God go I.” The author in, what appears to be overt glee, characterizes Blatter as having displayed extreme smugness on winning reelection to his position only four days before his seemingly unrepentant resignation–only doing it for his love of the sport. At the age of 79, I surely hope I do not have such a strong sense of entitlement that my failures create great joy in those around me. It is really uncomfortable if it happens even once, but in my case, I fail a lot. It makes me want to practice good behavior and maybe even more than that, a good attitude.

Update: This article that came out today at Sultan Knish describes huge problems created by this same sense of entitlement, but at the other end of the economic spectrum.

*Standard New York Times caveat: We are normally (wildly) underwhelmed by the veracity and unbiased reporting as practiced by the New York Times, but this article had some merit.

Betty Blonde #337 – 10/30/2009

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Too close for comfort

By Dad

On Saturday, May 30, 2015

In culture, Politics

It seemed kind of crazy to me that the following two posts appeared on Lorena’s Facebook one right after the other. The first is of our buddy, Karl at a Colosseum somewhere in or near the Middle East. The other is a from the Drudge Report. Is it a coincidence? Maybe not.

Karl on Drudge?

Betty Blonde #333 – 10/26/2009

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This empty-nester thing has its upside

By Dad

On Saturday, May 16, 2015

In culture, Family

Empty nesters We miss our kids a lot now that they are off at college. Still, there is a big upside to this empty-nester thing. Today, Lorena and I got up late, walked to breakfast at a nice little restaurant about half a block from our apartment. Then, this afternoon, we walked three or four blocks down to Jimmy John’s. Both time we had a leisurely meal. We have not had that luxury for years and years. We had to inhale our food and run off to a library, bookstore or laboratory as fast as possible because there was always a deadline.

Corollary to that is our apartment. We went from a big place on a big lot to a studio apartment with just barely enough stuff to get by. This might not last forever, but we are enjoying the latter. A lot. There are no lawns to mow, few windows, plates, floor and counters to wash, no equipment to maintain. It is fabulous to sit and look out our window at the most beautiful trees in existence, Douglas Fir along with the rest of the greener than anyplace else greenery in Oregon.

We know we are going to have to do something else before too long, but Lorena are very much enjoying the quiet, the communion with old friends, family and each other for now. It has reduced our urgency to do anything that might tie us down too much to do the “smelling of the roses” we are currently enjoying.

Betty Blonde #322 – 10/09/2009

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A difference between NC and OR

By Dad

On Thursday, April 30, 2015

In culture

Lorena went to Johnston Community College in Smithfield, North Carolina for one semester. She needed to get her transcripts sent from the four community colleges she attended to the one where she hopes to enroll in the fall in Oregon. After a little of the “interesting” style of service that is typical to the Portland area, we received the following note from Johnston Community College. We were reminded again of the tremendous refinement in large swaths of the native population in North Carolina and arguably the entire South. Not only did they do something they were not required to do that cost them some money to help us out, they admonished us and thanked us (I guess, for heeding the admonishment?). I will never not love North Carolina.
The difference between a refined culture and that of Portland

Betty Blonde #311 – 09/25/2009

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The faux happiness of the Danes

By Dad

On Sunday, April 26, 2015

In culture

Who would have thought I would be writing so much about the social situation of the Nordic countries? Maybe it is because they are heading for tragedy and tragedies are fascinating. This latest was inspired by a comment Kelly made that pointed to an article in the Atlantic about how the Danes are always at or very close to the very top of the self-identified happiness list. This interesting article says it ain’t so:

A surprising number of Danes agree with me, though: They also think their homeland is stultifyingly dull. Newspaper columnist Anne Sophia Hermansen, of the broadsheet Berlingske, caused a small kerfuffle recently when she expressed her feelings about what she saw as Denmark’s suffocating monoculture: “It is so boring in Denmark. We wear the same clothes, shop in the same places, see the same TV, and struggle to know who to vote for because the parties are so alike. We are so alike it makes me weep.”

Another prominent newspaper commentator, Jyllands-Posten’s Niels Lillelund, pinpointed a more serious side effect of the Danes’ Jante Law mentality: “In Denmark we do not raise the inventive, the hardworking, the ones with initiative, the successful or the outstanding; we create hopelessness, helplessness, and the sacred, ordinary mediocrity.”

I suppose there is nothing wrong with such a monolithic culture. I certainly grew up in such a culture here in Oregon. This really reminds me of the current zeitgeist of the establishment educational mono-culture in the west. I do not think anything is improved with the very specific kinds of acceptable “diversity” of race, artificial gender boundaries and political thought enforced in so many draconian ways in so many of the universities in the western world today. That kind of diversity is not really diverse. It creates a false knowledge about what is “right” coupled with a grating smugness that will be the death of western culture unless something is done to change it.

I believe in absolute truth. There is a right way to think and be. When a culture, whether it be that of the Danes or an entire educational system is monolithically wrong about what is right and demand that others conform to their sense of it all, unhappiness well ensue. It might not be in the short term, but it will happen.

There is a quote from A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle that pretty much captures these ideas, “No! Alike and equal are not the same thing at all!”

Betty Blonde #308 – 09/22/2009

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