Notwithstanding my attempts to search for hymns with mispelled words, I finally tracked down the lyrics to a particular hymn I’ve come to like.

I note to my embarassment that “Cavalry” (which is unit in an army, typically horse-mounted in the past, but usually referring to helicopter or light/scout armour units to-day) will affect the Google search result significantly than using the word “Calvary” (the place where Jesus was crucified, also known as “Golgotha”).

Needless to say, it is a fairly old hymn, and hard to track down. I happened to hear it on Old Christian Radio, which provides some of the oldest and best gems of Scirpturally sound hymns, the sort that moved the D.L. Moodys and the Hudson Taylors of yesteryear to the mission fields here and abroad.

That said… as much as I generally find the posting of song lyrics on blogs to be somewhat passé, I give you:

That Day At Calvary
by: Walt Huntley

I stood one day at Calvary,
Where Jesus bled and died.
I never knew He loved me so;
For me He was crucified.
And as I stood there in my sin,
His love reached down to me;
And, oh, the shame that filled my soul,
That day at Calvary.

I prayed one day at Calvary,
“I’m Thine forevermore;
Forgive me, Lord, for all my sin,
My lost estate restore,”
And as I prayed, to me He gave
Salvation full and free;
And, oh, the peace that filled my soul
That day at Calvary.

Good stuff, indeed. Their web site isn’t the prettiest, but they offer solid music (none of that dancey-pop or sold-out, compromised “contemporary Christian” music there).

Pitter, patter. The first drops fell
the sky darkened, a portent ill.
The daughters of man, with angels mingle
and man’s every intent evil, with purpose single.

The waters roser higher and higher still,
The Ship arose as well, by God’s perfect will.
At last the new seas covered over the highest ground,
The last souls perished, all men and giants drown’d.

The theme of this poem is based on Genesis, chapters six through seven.

… that is, all three people who actually read this blog… )

In the spirit of some of the verbal fencing I’ve been conducting over at places like Hello Waffles and Center of Gravitas, I offer this politically-corrected feely-goody legally butt-covering bit of a seasonal greeting.

All in good humour, of course.

6. The wishor warrants this greeting only for the limited replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wishor.

And for those of you who don’t get their fur bristled by a proper Christmas greeting (or didn’t care for all that fine print) :

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

May the Lord Jesus be with you and your families throughout these special days. (Isaiah 7:14)

I’ll see ya later next week.

You Are a Conservative Democrat

Frankly, the way most other Democrats behave embarasses you greatly. You pride yourself on a high level of morals, and you have a good grasp on right and wrong. It’s likely you think America needs to get back to its conservative, Juedo-Christian values. Why aren’t you a Republican then? Because you believe the goverment helps more than hurts.

Hmm. Always interesting, these internet quizzes.

As if one’s political beliefs could be perfectly distilled by a handful of questions. That, and the fact that I have been a registered Republican since 1988, although I am marginally happier that Lieberman beat out that other privileged weenie that had the Democrat nomination.

Me? I had myself figured for a fiscal conservative/social moderate/foreign policy hawk in this vein:

- I support the war on Terrorism (not because it was such a good political move by Bush, but it certainly beats having done nothing, and then having to have waited for the terrorists to strike out here again). Of course, I have other ideas on how to shorten our continuing deployment overseas which problem differ considerably from the NeoCon vision.

- I support at least partial privatization of social security, since under the current program, there probably won’t be anything in my account 35 years from now when I want to retire…

- I believe in privatizing most, if not all, of our education system - to give students and thier families wider choices (and also to help break the death grip of the one-sided ultra-liberal academistas over our children’s minds).

- I think seeing more faith-based initiatives for social outreach, and reducing the government safety net that is holding back an entire class of welfare queens and unmotivated people from wanting to improve thier lot. Let the churches get thier feet on the ground to preach to these folks and set limits on thier support, if the people are otherwise able-bodied and teachable for new skills.

Perhaps it is because I have a great dislike for the godlessly ultra-liberal wings of the Democrat party - that I tend not to want to support them much, even when they do have some good ideas (especially on the environment).

In keeping with my informal promise not to bait liberals on thier own blogs… at least for the duration of the Christmas Season, I’ve decide to expand a comment I’ve made on the COG. So…. here goes the expanded comment:

“The non-sectarian, non-denominational holiday season.”

Ah, man… what a beast to have to type that out. It has less of a contrived ring to it as Old Navy’s embarassing “Happy Merry Chrismakwanzukah” adverts of last year, or Seinfeld’s “Festivus for the rest of us” (sic).

Good thing we have “Copy & Paste” functionality in this brave new world of non-offensive holiday designations.

It makes me long for the days when we used to publicly acknowledge this season by calling it “Christmas”. I mean, we do not want to offend people with the notion that the King of Glory decided to become human and be born as a simple baby in Bethlehem.

The massive over-commercialization of the holiday and employing fat guys with a taste for wearing red velvet suits was one thing, but I suppose that someday even Santa will bow the knee at the altar of secular sterilization of God from our culture. After all, that original chubby bringer of gifts was a historical Christian who gave to the poor, especially children, and tried to imitate the love that Jesus gave us as an example.

Long gone and practically extinct are the nativity sets… I chanced upon a set for sale in my local Wal-Mart next to the cages full of Dodo birds, but that may be because of the recent infusion of Mexican immigrants to my area, bringing with them a more traditional sense of Catholicism.

Of course, the literature with the set was in Spanish first, with smaller typesetting for the English information. Este collecion de Navidad hecha en Mexico, if I remember correctly. An improvement, I suppose… in that at least it was actually manfactured on this continent.

Seasonal Kitsch is nice, but I wouldn’t mind seeing more public acknowledgement of the “reason for the season”. Instead, the once popularly displayed Nativity scenes have been displaced by blindingly bright reindeer, inflatable snowmen, and tacky plastic Santa Clauses.

Although I’d have to wonder how to deal with referring to other holidays in a PC vein…

Easter (or what I like to call “Resurrection Day”) would probably become “Earth Emergence Day”, to remove any possible connection with the day to either Passover or the Resurrection of a certain Jewish guy some two millenia ago. Probably merge that with the former Arbor Day (22. April “Earth Day”) to ensure that it only periodically falls on a Sunday, so as not to offend anyone who does not worship thier deities on that particular day.

Although Easter is probably safely removed from its Christian influences, now that we deal with sugar-induced toothaches and rabbits and egg-colouring sets, all of which bring much profit to dentists, confectioners, and plastic bunny-basket-grass manufacturers, and food colour salesmen respectively. Think of Easter, and I bet most folks will think of pastel-coloured foil-wrapped chocolate rabbits and the like.

I’ve got to wonder how many seconds some of these liberals would last in an Islamic nation, if they suggested mandating that Ramadan be renamed to something as “inoffensive” like “Self Control Month” or Eid-al-Fitr as “Charity Gift Day”, to thoroughly expunge any religious meaning to it.

I am at a loss to think of any other post-christian desginations for holidays, since most other days of importance to Christians have been properly pounded into as much obscurity as they no longer register on anybody’s radar anymore.

Touching on what was said about immigration in my responses to the posters on the COG, and to the Gay Prof in particular, I will admit that I have probably allowed myself to become a bit more panicked on it than is really needed: although Thomas W. Chittum’s work on The Civil War II and that video made by those Arizonans doing that Border Watch activity seems to imply that a major civil crisis is looming in the future… I will have to temper those observations that maintaining civil order in regions where we have had massive immigration of unassimilating enclaves of foreigners only becomes an issue when the economic order collapses.

SO, for the time being, I’ll partially retract my earlier stements, and will say that horrible racially or ethnically based killing events or other similar massive civil disturances within US borders will not occur too soon.

That kind of an event is difficult to fix a timeline to, although other events which loom in our future could precipitate such a crisis, for example, my pet crisis, Peak Oil.

Peak Oil itself, could arrive earlier or later, (some pundits optimistically place it as late as 2035, others would have us already past the Hubbert Peak, now on the gentler downslope, but not yet into the cataclysmic drop-off point back to Pleistocene living conditions).

I still sound a bit dramatic though, don’t I?
(more…)

After engaging in the somewhat heated discussion on the immigration issue over on Center of Gravitas, which (strangely enough) grew out of a debate on our VP’s daughter, Mary Cheney, and her impending arrival of a son.

For my last arguments - and a slight retraction of my stand on immigration as the cause of an eventual balkanizing of the USA, please see my second post, below this one.

I’ve decided to play nicer (at least for the remaining bit of the Christmas season) and not comment at length on some of the more … erm, uncomfortable things… that get said by other commenters of a liberal stripe on the blogs I like to read, such as one fellow who called for the squelching of any non-leftist voice, or another poster there who suggested that Ms. Cheney and Ms. Poe (the parents-to-be) have their pregnancy forcibly terminated (murdered) because such a thing was an affront to the cause of gay civil rights.

Apparently, Ms. Cheney’s decision to have a child in light of her father’s and much of the Right’s tendency toward limiting the family rights of the LGBT community is a bit of a ot button. Never mind that despite the wealth and relative security that this boy is to be born into, it will be scarcely a compensation for what he will endure growing up the son of a “conservative” lesbian couple, or at least one with a partner related to one of the more infamous members of the NeoCon movement.

This unfortunate boy will be regarded with caution, if not a certain prejudice by hetero families, and he will be seemingly despised and held in great derision by the majority of LGBT folks. Of course, one hopes that as he matures, and assuming he suffers no more than a small amount of psychological torment that - in the established practice of our day - doesn’t warrant him being chained to a pharamacy of behavioural modification drugs - he will grow up to break the grip of prejudice and hate from both sides of the equation.

Of course, I will be praying for God to draw him to salvation, that he may, as all men (and women) should, lean upon the Everlasting arms of Jesus.

As for all of the LGBT contention over Ms. Cheney… I find this rather amusing - especially since such a militant gay columnist as Dan Savage had said that Ms. Cheney’s uterus was hers to do with as she pleased¹. If indeed most out-of-closet LGBT folk are decidedly left of center, if not immediately signed up for the most liberal wings of the Democrat party by the local chapter of the ACLU… then much of the invective against Ms. Cheney strikes me as somewhat hypocritical.

I had always thought that the one redeeming quality of being Liberal was the idea of giving place to the opinions of all people - not excluding anyone. Yet even in the socially advanced and politically correct Liberal mind it still seems that, “some animals are more equal than others”. Lest anyone think I am being mean-spirited, that quote was from George Orwell’s Animal House - I am not suggesting that anyone here is an animal.

After all, it is the season for peace and good will, and all of that sort of thing.

Oink. Erm, excuse me.

Soy makes kids Gay.

… or so saith columnist Jim Rutz over at WorldNetDaily.

I wonder if the Trans-Fat veggie-nazis who are making us give up our super-sized McFat Fries and Crazy Cowburgers are going to take up this crusade anytime soon.

“Put down the Kikkoman, and step away from the Tofuburger. NOW.”

Nah, I am not seeing it. If this article has truth to it, it would seem to work to the benefit of folks who want to femenize our male population - and effective reduce it as well. According to Mr. Rutz, babies fed on soy-based formula (up to one fourth of the infant population) can suffer irreversible damage to thier developing endocrine glands, and suffer hormonal imbalances that in girls lead to early onset of menses, and delay puberty in boys.

Supposedly, soy degrades into compounds that inhibit the creation of testosterone, which is crucial to male development.

Among some of Mr. Lutz’s other interesting claims about soy are:

Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That’s why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today’s rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products. (Most babies are bottle-fed during some part of their infancy, and one-fourth of them are getting soy milk!) Homosexuals often argue that their homosexuality is inborn because “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t homosexual.” No, homosexuality is always deviant. But now many of them can truthfully say that they can’t remember a time when excess estrogen wasn’t influencing them.

So, we can now add Soy to the growing list of reasons why some boys love other boys instead of girls:

• supposed genetic factors
• early childhood sexual trauma (molestation)
• pre-pregnancy trauma (stress disorders and chemical abuse)
• exposure to (gay) pornography
• domineering mothers/elder sisters (Freudian theory)
• lack of strong father figure/broken home
• demon possession
• premature sexualization of youth/extreme permissiveness by authority figures
• normalization of previously deviant behaviours (not necessarily limited to sex)
• disenfrachisement of Christianity and God from the public sphere

Of course, I believe that none of these things, with the possible exception of the last, are by any means proofs of cause for people to “become” homosexual, although they certainly do nothing to heteronormalize people.

I think that they may work as factors together which may influence a person’s sexuality though. Sexuality may well be formed entirely before birth, but external or environmental factors are always pressing in and informing our choices and our experiences, which have a cumulative effect on how we choose to express that sexuality.

Some people are born with a disposition to sin in particular ways while not having a disposition to sin in other ways, but sin is still present in this world, and in our flesh. Much sin is built upon recurring patterns of addictive behaviour. For many, sex (of either orientation by both genders) is as much of an addiction as is crack cocaine or alcohol.

I believe that there could be a great many straight people who for various reasons and/or by training/conditioning, have never touched off the triggers that could “awaken” the homosexual desires in them… just as someone with a family history of alcoholism but seldom drinks himself, is not an alcoholic.

My opinion is that regardless of cause, deviant sexuality is but one of the many effects of sin reigning over a ruined world because of the single act of disobedience by our common human father and mother, Adam and Eve… but I see that I am digressing into a topic for another post.

The point of this is - trying to tie the incidence of homosexuality to the consumption of unfermented soy products is about as futile as tying it to any of the items in the above list. Mr. Lutz leaves us without any hard data to substantiate his hypothesis.

UPDATE: This article seems to be chock-a-block full of facts and figures connecting Mr. Lutz’s idea to some science.

Although I am still kind of leery of trying to peg a food to altering a child’s innate sexuality, as I said, it would be but one of may factors.

And besides, the argument we all need to think about is not the right-or-wrongness of being gay or this or that sin. It is about believing on Jesus and being saved, or rejecting His merciful gift.

Infertility, Aisle Three!

Mr. Lutz also credits Soy for being a cause of testicular infertility in males (again, lack of testosterone) and uterine hypertrophy in females, although I am unclear as to how that affects the ability of eggs to implant and grow to term. He equates this with the dramatic rise of fertility clinics in this country as well.

Given the sheer number of Chinese in this world, and contrasted with the declining birth rate of the Japanese, I would have to take a look at the occurence of soy in both diets.

The upshot of this is that most soy in Asian food (of which I eat of quite a bit) is in the sauce, and in things like miso (feremented soy bean paste used in soups and other cooking) and natto (fermented sticky soy beans), all of which, being fermented, have changed the molecular structure of the soy into a form that doesn’t put the damper on “the guys downstairs”.

The other soy (non-fermented “dangerous” stuff) is tofu itself, which in the Japanese diet is not consumed at every meal like rice is, but when served, is usually in portions of about three one-inch cubes of tofu per serving. And there is that green-tea flavoured soy milk, but I can only binge on that once or twice a month when we make our shopping run to the Japanese supermarket in New Jersey.

We generally avoid fast food outlets and anything that overtly sells itself as selling soy substitutes for its meat (if I am paying for a burger, I want semi-charred, ground-up dead ox-flesh on the plate with a trace of pink in the middle!)

Chinese food? Avoid places like “Super Panda” and “Lucky No. 1 Dragon” that have the easily recognized, grease and MSG-slathered numbered entrees like #48. General Tso’s Chicken.

General Tso probably never had to cook, since if he was a real general, he was probably preoccupied with fending off other warlords or bandit tribes to worry much about marketing his chicken recipe. That’s colonel’s work anyway.

Instead, go for a place in your local Chinatown (or a Chinese restaraunt outside of North America) - one that has a mostly Chinese clientele, and actual wait staff, and order up some real Chinese food and see how much of that has unfermented soy products in the cuisine. I have, and I haven’t seen much of it, if any.

As for other soy products, the aforementioned green-tea flavoured soy milk is quite popular, but is not exactly the national Japanese beverage either. Soy burgers may be quite popular though, especially in light of Japanese reticence to consume (especially American) beef as a result of a few Mad Cow scares. I think that the ongoing fertility issue amongst the Japanese is less a matter of actually making babies, but a combination of the karoshi (death from overwork) culture and the ongoing tendency to stall marriage and childbirth with it until much later in life.

And good science does show that fertility rates tend to decrease for older men and women, with a marked decrease for both sexes over age 40. I reckon that biological clock is not “just for the gals” after all.

Turning my attention back to the USA and our southern border in particular, I have nothing positive to say about how the Bush Administration (and Congress along with it) has been consistently compromising our security.

Immigration is not a bad thing at all, when controlled. Immigrants and thier descendants make up the overwhelming majority of our population. And perhaps there is with our ongoing illegal immigration crisis, as some ethnologists say, a certain grim parallel to white European encroachment onto Native American land from the time of Hernan Cortes until the last great western rush of settlers following the end of the War Between the States (1861-1864) which saw the closing of the American Frontier.

Perhaps there is a sort of a ironic justice at work here: we displaced the “First Nations” peoples (or Indians for you less politically correct folk) … and a short 150 years later, we are slowly being displaced out of the American Southwest by a tsunami of illegal immigrants streaming in from the Mexican border.

Am I preaching a form of cultural ethnocentrism? Of course I am. I am not ashamed to say that despite some of its shortcomings, western civilization still offered a higher standard of living, and greater opportunities. Which is not to say that we could not have learned a few more things from the First Nations people, and perhaps dealt with them more equitably.
(more…)

Let me preface this by saying that there are a great many things that are inimical to the Human Race, and at the same time all too common to us if we persist in our inborn ignorance.

One of them is stupidity (or if you like the KJV, brutishness) according to God’s word (Jeremiah 51:17) :

All mankind is stupid, devoid of knowledge; Every goldsmith is put to shame by his idols, For his molten images are deceitful, And there is no breath in them (NASB)

What this means in practical terms is that idolatry and stupidity are closely tied together; one is the result of the other.

In similar fashion, neither Persians or Arabs are limited suffering according to the confounding stupidity that is the worship of Allah (who, by the way, was originally the moon god idol of a particular Arab tribe thousands of years ago).

I say again: Islam is not just an Arab or Persian disease. It is a disease of humanity, which has been largely contained in the West by the light of God’s word revealed first to the Jews, and then to all who would believe in the Gentiles’ world (at the time, Asia Minor and Mediterranean Europe, from which it spread around the known world in several generations).

That being said, I came across a post over at the Gateway Pundit which was dicussing the arrest and capture of over a dozen Islamist radicals who were plotting to conduct terror operations in Iraq. Among these individuals were nine Frenchmen, two Belgians, and an American. Yup, more John Walker Lindh in the making.

According to Gateway Pundit and the sources he cited, these young men were there to study Islamic law at Al-Azhar University, but were indeed learning the ways of Jihad, and they sought to recruit others to thier wicked cause.

Indeed, the insanity of Islam knows neither race nor nationality - its all-consuming maw is ready to consume anyone who stumbles into it.