Beef Jerky Action Cam??

I am not making this up. Here I am, watching the big college football game of the week on tv — LSU v Alabama — suddenly wondering how I can be so riveted by any meme that involves a “beef jerky action cam!”

Pure Dead Brilliant — Jon Stewart Channels Glenn Beck

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Rice Krispies No Health Food, Much Less Medicine Magic

And that goes for Cocoa Krispies too, no matter what outrageous corporate “colors” the First Amendment might hold its nose and permit to be inflicted upon our evermore-poorly educated populace.

Rice Krispies Are No Substitute For Swine Flu Vaccine:

Cereal giant Kellogg said it’s dropping the eyebrow-raising claim that a box of Rice Krispies or Cocoa Krispies, “Now helps support your child’s IMMUNITY.”

. . .health guru Marion Nestle of New York University: “Yes, these nutrients are involved in immunity, but I can’t think of a nutrient that isn’t involved in the immune system,” she told USA Today. “. . . it’s cases like this that prove ‘in the absence of FDA action, food marketing is allowed to run rampant.’

Over the years, food makers complained that if supplements could use such claims, they could too. At first, the FDA issued warning letters to food companies using structure-function claims. It stopped after the courts ruled that food companies could make claims for the health benefits of their products on First Amendment grounds.

Now FDA says

Capitol Hill Mad Hatters Show Up for More Tea Partying

Tea Partiers Hit Capitol:

They arrived as early as 8:30 a.m., by bus, car and plane — from Bluffton, S.C., Des Moines and Dorris, Calif. — to rally with conservative lawmakers and possibly roam the halls of Congress.

“Can you hear us now!” they chanted from the foot of the Capitol, as they awaited the arrival of their heroine — [Michele] Bachmann.

“She’s very brave,” said Nancy Holmberg of Dorris.

“Palin/Bachmann 2012,” came a shout from the crowd. The crowd is also chanting Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s name and demanding that she come address them on the steps of the Capitol.

. . . Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) shook hands at a wall line like a presidential contender.

“This is too great,” he said.

Btw I heard this fellow Rep. King, on MSNBC this morning hyping the event. He specifically said it was a show of force meant to make moderate Democratic reps “more afraid of their constituents than they were afraid of Nancy Pelosi.”

Well, okay. At least we’ve now clearly established in your own words that the Republican goal is not good governance but FEAR. Now we’re just haggling over the price . . .

Mike Lux on America’s “Historical, Hysterical Conservatives”

They have used the same arguments — for tradition and states rights, against “big government socialism” — in every era. In those past eras, history was not on their side. It is not in our time, either.

. . .These conservative arguments have always been tinged with more than a little hysteria, just like today. And no matter what, conservatives always insisted they owned the moral high ground.

Related news reinforces the Lux WorldView: the former governor of my state now accuses President Obama of attacking American capitalism. Jeb Bush does this not just publicly but apparently for calculated effect not on capitalism or the economy’s current crisis, but his own political prospects.

He needed to make the news he’s been so out of and must re-control if his plan to resurrect any of his traditional dynasties — the Bush family, GOP, Roman Catholic Church — with himself anointed to lead, has a prayer.

Young Son the Political and Cultural Cynic

So you know he’s been reading Les Miserables, all 1,400 pages.

I guess it makes sense he would relate the author’s social themes to his own present reality as synched up with his own favorite social commentary artists by night, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and as opposed to the years of rantings and vitriol he’s heard by day from Limbaugh, Beck and Hannity on the car radio.

He chortled over a narrative passage (I think describing the Thenardier family) last night, reading it aloud to the whole family and marveling that Hugo had somehow anticipated the third-millennium GOP!

I probably wouldn’t have blogged it except then this morning, I saw he had posted it to FaceBook:

“There are souls which, crablike, crawl continually toward darkness, going back in life, rather than advancing in it;
using what experience they have to increase their deformity; growing worse without ceasing, and becoming steeped more and more thoroughly in an intensifying wickedness.”

– Victor Hugo, sound like anybody you know of?

How Do You Define What’s Up (at pussy)Cat’s?

The latest round of thinking parents playing “What’s in a Name?” as a floating blog-game of religion and politics costumed as each other for Halloween, apparently started with Lynn and JJ and many commenters both places, riffing on Frank Schaeffer’s books and his new MSNBC repudiation of the evangelical radicalism he was weaned on, taught to use as a weapon of mass destruction in mainstream politics and governance, back in mid-century America. He used some very colorful and contentious language to make his case that this was a bad thing then and a worse thing now.

Cat linked that video and the posts, used it as a mirror exercise in fallacious argument with her kids, which interested JJ enough to keep her playing over there instead of here for a couple of days.

Oh,and Monty Python got involved because isn’t it axiomatic that satisfying intercourse between smart people just does revert to Monty Python sooner or later?

And here we are. My last comment at Cat’s is reproduced below as an invitation if you’re so inclined, to take on the Python persona of your choice and join the improv, here or there across artificial boundaries and dubious definitions as you prefer:

Well, let’s define terms immediately upon using them, or far better, stick to dictionary definitions. A good argument needs no redefinitions, right?

Or a good argument is almost entirely redefinitions. Need we first argue to define good argument?

To that point, I’m surprised you missed this Python definition of argument!

I laughed at that in the 70s because it was really absurd while Bill Buckley was doing Firing Line on PBS for real — breathing life into intellect and intellect into argument and argument into television.

Initially, Cleese simply contradicts everything that Palin says. Palin insists that it is not an argument but merely contradiction and asserts that “argument’s an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gain-saying of anything the other person says.” Cleese asserts that, to have an argument, he must “take up a contrary position.” Palin is frustrated until he realises that Cleese is actually engaging him in a sort of meta-argument about what constitutes an argument.

But it’s not so funny when television and real life become one big intellectually bankrupt contradiction clinic 24-7.

I think of “good argumentation” much like, ahem, other forms of healthy human intercourse.

It is meant as a creative force to uplift, connect and sustain virtues rather than do harm to anyone directly or indirectly through vice and self-indulgence. It is “good” intercourse and fun to share with the right person for the right reasons, when it’s

War, War, War Revisited

See Because Liz Cheney is a War Criminal too in the rogues’ gallery detailed, then proceed:

Liz Cheney, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter, is founding a new group called “Keep America Safe” that will coordinate a campaign of fear intended to paint the President as an appeaser disinterested in protecting America.

The Cheneys have never been shy when criticizing President Obama or his foreign policy. Soon after Obama was elected, former Vice President Dick Cheney took to the airwaves to warn the country of the dire risk faced by ending the internationally-condemned practice of torture. Now, his eldest daughter Liz is creating a nonprofit aimed at making such scare tactics into a permanent campaign.

Conservative partisan and failed Iraq war prognosticator William Kristol is one of the founding members. Kristol has also called for an invasion of Iran, suggesting that perhaps this time, we will, in fact, be “greeted as liberators.”

Keep America Safe’s mission statement parrots some of Kristol’s paranoid and dubious claims. . . To Keep America Safe, apparently, requires not one or two but three simultaneous wars.

Because Dick Cheney and his spawn can’t or won’t shut up and slink off the national stage in shame, I am reposting this from April, just as urgent as ever:

War war war, fiddle-dee-dee!

Is this the only power of story conservatives get, war?
All they can talk about, the only way they can make a case for their “freedom” values and respect for “life”? WMD as WWJD?

Not just fighting with each other over literal fights in the Middle East, which you’d think would be plenty of real war and then some. But no-oo-o. We also have to re-fight themes of:

“Collision: Is Religion Absurd or Good for the World?”

Last fall, we went on tour debating the topic “Is Religion Good For The World?” Our arguments were captured on film for a new documentary, Collision. Are our morals dictated to us by a supreme entity or do discoveries made by science and reason, make Atheism a natural conclusion? You decide.

Christopher Hitchens and Pastor Douglas Wilson
Posted: October 20, 2009 10:18 AM
“Collision: Is Religion Absurd or Good for the World?”

And to go with it, I offer religion historian and former nun Karen Armstrong in Foreign Policy Magazine, with THINK AGAIN: God:

“Theological ideas come and go, but the quest for meaning continues. So God isn’t going anywhere. And when we treat religion as something to be derided, dismissed, or destroyed, we risk amplifying its worst faults. . . .”

Finally, Dale at Meming of Life is writing about how we can communicate with each other across religious-atheist divides:

Now, thanks in large part to the Internet, the nonreligious are finally finding each other and forming communities—with the same good and bad results. Sometimes we devote ourselves to good things like service and social justice, and sometimes we focus and facilitate a level of hatred and division that would not be possible without the reinforcement of that likeminded community.

So it’s not just a religious thing. It’s a human thing. And the difference between the good and bad result goes right back to comfort and contact with difference.

The more a group shuts off contact with unlike minds, the sloppier it gets.

Telling Children Who They Are and What’s Within Them

“You are not half. You are a whole soul living in a divided world. “

There Is No Such Thing as Half
by Joanna Brooks

What comes out when a Mormon and a Jew raise a kid?

. .You are a body spun from ancient dust and ancient water; you are the glorious hope of legions of ancestors who lived poor and died ugly; you are a soul realized in the temple of my hipbones. You are what we all are: composite, recycled. You are what we all become someday: the sum of a series of accidents and choices. A lovely mess, that’s you. Sanctify yourself with righteous words and deeds, and you will have nothing to worry about.

Kids Need Real Mom to Show Up, Not TV Reality Show

UPDATE 1:55 pm EDT – just heard the entire sheriff’s news conference on CNN live, extraordinary. All three boys are said to have had “100% involvement” in the hoax, and what the sheriff called “guilty knowledge” — so one of the felonies with which the the parent/s will be charged is “contributing to the delinquency of minors.”

_____________

Note to Balloon Boy’s Mom: Get a Clue, These are Your Real Kids, Not Some TV Show:

I don’t judge whether your sons swear, pick their noses, fart, burp or jump over banisters. I have two little boys. Glass houses. . .

That said, Mayumi, get a clue.

As of press time Saturday it seems you have either been dragged or agreed to participate in a stunt by a husband who is a child and a women- bashing gasbag. What’s more, he apparently wants your boys to be raging, women-hating gasbags. . .

These are your real live children with their own humiliations and their own storms to chase. Hold on tightly to them. They need at least one parent to keep them from flying too close to the sun.

How Our Unschooling is Like Charlotte Mason Homeschool Method

A new home-educating mom (okay, it’s Beta, hi Beta!) has been doing lots of reading and thinking about education methods, as our older-in-educating-herself-on education friend, the New Unschooler (hi Colleen!) did last year.

I just added this comment to Beta’s mix:

I was reading a little about Charlotte Mason homeschooling and I see much that reflects our unschooled education methods (real books, no lectures, etc) but I was never a big Nature Girl — more inside the library or kitchen or theatre type — so it hadn’t appealed to me years ago for that reason and I’d forgotten about it.

Then here in the US, Ken Burns’ new documentary series for PBS started airing, called National Parks: America’s Best Idea.

Young Son (age 14) and I got absorbed in it, recording and watching in the afternoons before his own natural most active time (evening) and about halfway through the series, he got his dad watching with him for a couple of weekend afternoons. We all know a lot more about Nature now than we did! It’s historically riveting but also gorgeous and serene and it moves at a naturalist’s graceful, outdoor-majestic pace — just wonderful Power of Story all around.

Without having to actually go outside.

So it reminded me that we too are eclectic in many good ways. The biggest difference between what we do and the CM method is that what we do is no method, with (what personally is found to be) nasty bits included like it or not . . .

Obviously we unschoolers despite eschewing curriculum and training of children’s habits, nevertheless NATURALLY integrate the philosophical cornerstones of “education as life” and “education as the science of relation” while one bit from wikipedia on Charlotte Mason’s teaching philosophy even sounds Obama-inspired, hmmm, and didn’t his mother teach him at home in the early mornings, wonder if she was a secret CM disciple and he its able pupil . . .