if NASA would just stop sending all those rovers up there…

Climate change happens. It is real. And it is happening on Mars at about the same rate as it is here.

Oh, but the causes are different; they have more wind there, so it couldn’t be that the sun is just being a galactic over-achiever.

But I have to wonder what would be happening in our atmosphere if the Church of Al-mighty Gore wasn’t producing so much hot air.

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easy women, easy men

If you came to look at this based on the title of the posting, you’re probably going to be disappointed. There are no tips on finding “easy” partners here.
Rather, I want to focus on an old phrase I’ve heard a million times, and believe to be a horrible misstatement:
Boys are easier to raise than girls.
I suppose it is true if you think of parenting as raising boys and girls; the thing is, we’re raising a man and a woman, not a boy and a girl. If you’re thinking “semantics, Scrap” then you aren’t tuned in very well.
At some point, sooner than I expect, certainly before I’m prepared for it, my munchkins are going to be adults. They will be living under someone else’s (hopefully their own) roofs, and the period of time where I have any formative influence will be over. In reality, my influence will likely end long before they move out, so this becomes even more important in the present.
In 1967, an author by the name of Charles Hummel wrote an essay that became a series of books focusing on The Tyranny of the Urgent. His premise was that we are often focused on the urgent to such an extent that we miss the important.
Boys are easy to raise. You don’t have to give them as much attention on a day-to-day basis. They can take stumbling and crashing better than girls. But if they aren’t taught a little more about life, they can go oh-so-terribly wrong as young adults. Girls, on the other hand, tend to be more fragile and needy as young’uns. I hope that statement is not offensive; I am only stating what I observe to be true with my kids.
If we give each of the two the attention they demand, she’ll get an incredibly large chunk of our time as she grows. She wants to be held, wants to talk to us, wants to be very relational. She is the image of her mom. He wants to explore, would rather be doing whatever it is that is in his head at the moment than talking, and generally only demands lap-time when he is exhausted or hurt. In some respects, that’s me all over.
There was a fair amount of told-you-so going on when the charges in the Duke rape case were finally dropped, but here’s a thought; wouldn’t the whole thing have been easier if the boys on the team had not hired two “entertainers” that night? What if they had been mature enough to find something useful to do that didn’t involve something that calls to their basest nature?
“Boys will be boys, Scrap.”
Yes they will. But by the time they are eighteen years old, they are no longer boys.
When it comes down to it, I believe that raising a boy to become the kind of man he should be requires a lot more effort than raising a girl to become a woman who will make you proud.

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an indian gigolo

Richard Gere can’t buy a break.

Remember his appeal at the concert following 9/11? I believe he was the only one booed off the stage. He said something like, “Now is not the time for anger.” It was obvious he didn’t have much support from the crowd of police and firemen that night.

So he’s a lover, not a fighter.

Not surprising – he’s really big on the Zen thing.

But now he may be in trouble if he tries to go back to visit the Dalai Llama. And why?

Because the conservatives in India want him strung up for kissing a Bollywood starlet.

Public displays of affection are not looked on kindly in India.

It’s perfectly alright to set your wife on fire if you want a divorce; but kissing is verboten.

It’s okay to dismember your neighbor if he is not of your religion; but smooching gets prison time.

Kinda makes you wanta tell somebody to kiss off…just don’t say it publicly, that’s probably illegal too.

in a soldier’s own words

I heard the tail end of this phone call on Boortz – a sergeant who is heading back to Iraq – Harry and Nancy aren’t listening to this soldier either…

god is a very busy … man?

Nancy P. and company are very busy. They are so busy trying to end the war that they don’t have time to attend any meetings with the head honcho of the troops in Iraq, General David Petraeus.

Funny how Pelosi and Reid want so badly to take the position of Commander in Chief, but they aren’t willing to even talk to the people with their feet on the ground over there.

Nancy believes herself omnipotent – she doesn’t need input from others, because she knows all. Heck, on her recent Mideast Nobel-prize-hopeful tour, she told Israel’s neighbors that Israel was ready to deal in areas where the Israeli government said, “That’s not what we told her.” Nancy apparently knows more about Israel’s foreign policy than Israel knows about Israel’s foreign policy.

She sees all; she knows all.

If people are concerned that US foreign policy has suffered in the last several years, don’t worry – Nancy is a one-woman State Department unto herself. I’m sure she’ll have the international community eating out of her hand in no time.

My apologies to Trekkies for abusing a line from “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier” for a post title.

a must-see for parents

Do you have your trunk monkey?

“died for nothing”

Lessons learned from Blacksburg:

• We still respond somewhat slowly to events unfolding in “unlikely” places. Tom Clancy wrote about a mall attack a decade ago; this was about two years after he wrote about someone flying a jet into the Capital Building. Experts have been saying loud and long that the next targets would likely be heartland, small-town stuff. A poor response to the Va Tech shootings demonstrates what one person could do – what would a coordinated effort look like?
• Stop, drop, and roll is not always appropriate. This dude wasn’t robbing a bank; he was trying to kill as many as possible on his way out of this world. We should be training people in self-defense rather than self-esteem. In a classroom full of metal desks, everyone just hit the floor when they heard the shots coming closer. I mean no disrespect to those who did what their instincts told them; I do believe we should be teaching people to give them a new instinct – self-preservation rather than fear.

A nut with a death wish should not be allowed to walk at will from room to room where twenty-something people are just laying on the floor hoping not to be shot. I’ve heard some talk of “heroes” last Monday; someone who put themselves in harm’s way to try to stop the killing – that person would be a hero.I heard an interview with one VTech student yesterday who talked about how important it was that people not forget his friends and classmates, so that they will not have “died for nothing.”

You want to bring something positive from this mess? Take action. Prepare. Don’t train your kids to be sheep, waiting for the slaughter; teach them to respond with the knowledge that their actions could save a dozen others rather than wait and hope the next moron runs out of ammunition.

as iron sharpens iron…

One morning recently when my beloved and I were being highly relational, she reminded me of something I once asked her.

“We both feel like God brought us together; so why is it that He did that when we tend to set each other off so much sometimes?”

If the God brought us together thing freaks you out, substitute we’re soul-mates, or whatever works for you.

She mentioned it because she had an answer. A darn good one, I think.

There is a book called Relational Masks by Russell Willingham that talks about such stuff, and he puts it this way (not quoting here):  Marriage isn’t all about being comfy with each other. Marriage is a picture of how God relates to us; He’s in it for the long haul, seeking our long-term joy versus our short term giddiness. I avoided the word “happiness” there intentionally – “happiness” used to mean something important, but has been debased to what I call giddiness.

The picture Willingham paints comes from the Scripture about iron sharpening iron. Ever sharpened iron? It is a violent process. A knife does not get sharp through polishing it with a chamois. It takes something equally tough, tearing away at the metal, removing the imperfections to make it sharp.

I’m not saying that all marital disagreements are part of this process. There are times when I’m just being a butthead.

But there are times when something about my wife’s personality exposes a rough area in me, and vice versa. That’s when sparks fly, and I should be glad for it.

humanity is inately evil; film at eleven

There are those in the world who try to tell us that we are all basically good, and that evil will go away if we just regulate it enough.

I would argue that the events at Virginia Tech this week demonstrate the monster that lurks inside us all.

Poll after poll shows that a very high percentage of people would do horrible things to others if they knew they would not be caught and there were no consequences. Most of us have become very good at filtering our behavior to keep the darkest part of our nature under control, but the basic badness is still there.

So why does the media continue to feed the dark side? Why do they show us the images and play the words of someone who let their inner monster come out to play in such a horrific fashion? They do it for ratings, with no concern for consequences.

But there are consequences. The term “copy-cat killings” has been bouncing around newsrooms non-stop since Monday, and giving the wacko hours of coverage only glamorizes what he has done. Now, if your filtering system is fairly intact, you probably don’t think glamorizing is an appropriate word here; but picture this:

A disaffected youth is watching all of this coverage. He has tremendous anger pent up, maybe from being abused as a kid, possibly because his parents treat him as an inconvenience rather than give him any true sense of his value. He has hormones raging that he doesn’t understand, and is embarrassed to talk about with whomever might be willing to listen, if such a person exists. He wants to be known, he feels like a failure, and he’s been brought up to believe that he truly is an inconvenient spasm of nature, rather than the pinnacle of intentional creation. And here he finds an unexpected hero, a guy who was a lot like him and now has a name that people will remember. It’s a way out.

See, years ago people who decided life wasn’t worth living generally took themselves out and left others alone. But our culture has taught us that we are victims, and that any misery we suffer must be someone else’s fault. They must be made to pay. They did it to us. It is all their fault. I bear no personal responsibility.

Truly, there are times when our suffering is the result of someone else’s actions. The percentage of people who were sexually abused as children is alarmingly high, and continues to grow. I don’t deny that the evil is begat by other evil.

But to some people’s minds, there is a need to take their misery out on as many others as possible.

And each time something like this happens, and we give the perpetrator just what he hoped for, posthumous noteriety, a seed is planted for the next one.

And it won’t matter if we take away the guns; people are very creative with evil. Extremists in Iraq are killing large numbers without firing a shot.

Stop covering the psycho. It doesn’t “give meaning” to the deaths, and it encourages the next one.

guns don’t kill people; sick people use whatever means are available to kill people

Read this.

‘Nuff said.