More Global Warming Mischief

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

While everyone was occupied with the boiling disaster that is Obamacare, the Worst President Ever issued yet another executive order on Friday, Nov. 1. This peach is entitled, “Preparing the United States for the Impacts of Climate Change.”

And the way we do that, boys and girls, is… can you guess?… to give the federal government more power! Because if the schmendricks in Washington get enough power, they’ll control the weather and protect us from Global Warming. (See the report from GOP USA, Nov. 4, on Free Republic.)

They will Save the Planet by setting up a special “climate change task force” of progs and ninnies, and by giving the federal government more control of land use and resource policies. By “federal government” they mean the President, especially.

Seeing the terrific job they’re doing, controlling health care, we don’t see why they shouldn’t be allowed to control the weather, too.

Can you imagine the “climate policy” equivalent of Obamacare?

They should’ve run this out for Halloween! It would’ve given everybody a damned good scare.

 

Google Ads Embarrass Columnist

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Once a week, I have a column in News With Views ( http://www.newswithviews.com ). Last week, I wrote about “church leaders” fleeing from the culture war.

I heard from a couple of readers who wondered if I was quite all there: not because of anything I said, but because of an ad that ran on the same page. It featured a semi-nude woman posed seductively to invite “male gamers” into some kind of imaginary orgy. Hubba-hubba, etc. One reader wanted to know what I thought I was doing, having an ad like that to go along with my column. He said it looked like I was pushing soft-core pornography.

Who, me? I have absolutely nothing to do with whatever ads appear on my page. I passed my readers’ objections on to the editor-in-chief, who soon discovered what had happened.

The ads were put there by Google. ‘Nuff said. This has happened to me before, and to many other writers. You write a column opposing the same-sex parody of marriage, and right up next to it, Google drops an ad for a “gay dating” service.

I am convinced Google does this on purpose, to make the writer look like a hypocrite or, at best, an ass. There’s no reason why the ordinary reader should know how a particular ad winds up on a particular page. So a lot of these readers wind up blaming it on the poor, innocent writer. And the reds at Google score another point against conservatives.

So, in case you’ve ever wondered why an ad for a dominatrix appears next to a column objecting to aberrant sexual lifestyles, remember–the writer didn’t put it there. And on most websites, neither did the editor.

Google did it… to mess with your mind.

 

‘City of Boneheads’ (a Novel for Not Very Bright Teens)

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

As someone who writes novels for young people, I try to read as much Young Adult fiction as I can stomach. Occasionally I discover something really good. But not this time.

City of Bones, by Cassandra Clare, was a New York Times best-seller in 2007 and went on to win dozens of awards. I’ve learned that an award from the American Library Assn. usually denotes tacky or unwholesome subject matter.

This particular book embodies most of what’s wrong with YA fiction. Dividing readers into age-group classes is a dumb idea. We don’t have Old Adults or Middle-Aged Adults fiction, or Doddering Adults With One Foot in the Grave Already fiction. Why set up a literary bantustan for younger readers?

(But didn’t you just say you write “novels for young people”? Yeah, I do–in the sense that I don’t presuppose the reader knows or cares about certain matters that only seem to become important after one has passed the age of 50. I also leave out profanity, graphic violence, and sex scenes. The reality is that my publisher disapproves of such things in a novel. I have learned to live without them, and my books are much the better for it. I strive to write material that any reasonably intelligent person from 12 years old and up can enjoy.)

Cassandra Clare is not an awful writer. She knows how to set a scene and how to keep the story flowing. But she writes down to her audience, as if readers under the age of 21 just aren’t able to think outside a narrow “teen culture” box–a little coffin for the brain. Her dialogue is dreadful–what you might expect a clever extraterrestrial to write after spending some decades monitoring MacDonald’s commercials. It would be a better book if the characters never spoke. She even succumbs to the temptation to make her rigidly teenage protagonists superheroes with cool powers. I hate superheroes with cool powers. And there’s a lot of technicolor violence.

After some 200 pages of it, I doubt I’ll have the patience to read all the way to the end of this 500-page monstrosity.

And I can’t think of any reason why you should, either.

Hey, Teens–Clue Me In

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I am one of those adults who write Young Adults fiction. Note that none of it is actually written by young adults.

Because this is where I park my pen, I try to read a lot of contemporary YA fiction to see what the standards are, these days. It ain’t lookin’ good.

The oldsters who write books for teenagers seem to think “young adults” need a steady diet of gore, cruelty, aberrant sex, and really corny dialogue that will be unreadable, a generation down the road. Most of them write with a certain image of “teen culture” in their minds, and imprison their characters and their readers in it from cover to cover. I know I wouldn’t have liked these books when I was 16.

Here is my shout-out to young readers. If you have teenagers in your house, ask them to respond. I need to hear from them.

Do you folks really like Young Adults fiction, as it is today? Do these books speak to you? Do they create a world in which you want to spend a lot of time? Do the old crocks who write them really understand young people? What does it do for you, to read about persons having sex with vampires–dead bodies, you know–or other kinds of monsters?

I ask because I write books which I hope young readers will enjoy and find edifying, (Sly hint: they make great Christmas presents) without being soppy or patronizing. I can see that mine are very different from most of what’s out there–especially from most of the fantasy, which constitutes a big chunk of the teen market.

Having been young once, I have this notion that I’m still much the same person I was then, and that there isn’t that much difference between “young” and “old”–aside from what is emphasized as a marketing ploy.

Tell me if I’m wrong.

 

Politicians Who Defend Our Values (LOL)

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I can’t go hardly anywhere on the Internet without being peppered by ads for New Jersey Democrats. We, poor devils, have a gubernatorial and legislative election next week.

Somehow Republican ads never appear. I wonder if unlimited campaign money from the teachers’ union has anything to do with that. I haven’t seen any ads for the airhead who is running for governor against Chris Christie. I interviewed her once. We would be better off electing a statue.

So, it’s all Dems, all the time.

They say they “defend NJ values.” What values are those? Same-sex pseudo-marriage? Abortion? Freebies for illegal aliens? Cory Booker, our new interim U.S. Senator, likes to pretend he’s a sodomite so he can “challenge people’s homophobia.” You have to be brain-dead not to know what Democrats “value.”

Why do they presume we’re so abysmally stupid?

(Uh, because we elect them?)

The candidates promise to keep property taxes “low.” Cue in maniacal laughter.

They promise to “fight for us” against “draconian budget cuts” blamed on the Republicans, even though the Dems control the legislature.

“Fight for us” can be literally translated into English: “Fight for more money for the teachers’ unions.” Maybe teachers will be able to retire at 40, and not have to choose between buying a horse farm and going on perpetual world cruises: give ’em pensions that’ll allow them to have it all.

We ought to have some protection against this much hypocrisy.

Of course, we could protect ourselves just by never, never, never voting for a Democrat or an incumbent of either party. We would have to outvote the dead, the illegal aliens, the multiple voters, and the rest of the Dem voting base. But we could do it, if we put our minds to it.

Always presuming the electorate has a mind. Jersey pols seem to do very well by presuming that it doesn’t.

Can Anyone Explain This?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

There’s a young woman in our neighborhood who goes around with half her head shaved down to the scalp. That’s right: I said half. The other half is normal.

It looks horrible. And my question is, What’s it all about? Is she imitating some ridiculous celebrity I never heard of? (For that matter, what’s the use of celebrities hardly anyone has ever heard of?) Is it some kind of half-baked ideological statement? Or is she just plain daft? She isn’t doing it for Halloween, because her head always looks like that.

I have ruled out hallucination because other people have seen her, too.

Can anyone tell me why any young woman would want to keep half her head shaved clean?

And does it matter which half?

Religion as a form of Mental Illness?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Check out Steel on Steel where I address this issues. I’m introduced about 13 minutes into this program.

Steel on Steel: Religion as a form of Mental Illness?
So is religion a form of mental illness? Seems to be a trend that way in some academic circles. We’ve been warning that mental health will be the upcoming hammer for controlling dissenting groups and depriving them of rights. There’s a growing trend in Great Britain to label religion as a source of mental imbalance.

A New Hymn For a Defeated Church

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

First it was the Pope suggesting the Roman Catholic Church should chill out on such matters as sodomy, adultery, and abortion.

Now the Southern Baptist Conference has one-upped him. The new honcho of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Russell Moore, recently called for his church to raise the white flag on the whole culture war, and to be “winsome”–I don’t know about you, but I have really begun to hate that word–so as not to turn off “young believers” who have spent most of their lives in public schools learning that fornication is a virtue and the Bible is both fiction and hate speech.

To help the institutional churches express themselves more clearly, a new interdenominational hymn has been written: Throwing in the Towel, to be sung to the tune of Bringing in the Sheaves. Here are the lyrics.

Triumph for abortion, joy for same-sex “marriage,”

Now we understand: the bad guys always win.

We the church surrender, we the church cry “uncle!”

Now we understand there’s no such thing as sin.

Chorus

Throwing in the towel, throwing in the towel,

We know when we’re licked, we’re throwing in the towel (repeat)

We have been defeated, we have lost the culture;

Gates of hell have finally ‘gainst the church prevailed.

Sorry, Lord, we blew it, we just couldn’t do it,

Satan’s team has won and we the church have failed. Chorus

And do remember to be nice and winsome to the lions, when they force you into the arena.

I’ve Finished Writing My Book (Oh, No)

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Yup, yesterday afternoon I finished writing The Glass Bridge, Book #7 of the Bell Mountain Series.

This is the kind of writing I love best of all, and I have loved this book from the first page to the last. So it’s gonna be kind of dreary around here without it. But a Book #8 will come along, by and by, because the general arc of the story requires it.

So what’s this one about? Oh, the usual. Danger, adventure, love, hate, treason, courage, honor, weird animals, just another day in the neighborhood. If you’ve read the first five books, you know there’s a huge treasure-trove of gold at the top of Golden Pass–and who is going to wind up owning it? And what’ll they do to get it?

But first Book #6, The Palace, has to be published. We’re waiting for the cover art from Kirk DouPonce.

By the way, if you’ve read the books, and if you know how to do it, I really could use more Customer Reviews on my amazon.com pages. You know, in the Young Adult fiction market, I’m competing with books about boys who want to be girls, witchcraft, teens having sex with vampires or zombies or whatnot. Help me elbow some of this crap off the shelves!

 

Episcopal Church Hosts Muslim Prayer

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

The Episcopal Church in America has mastered the ABC of pop theology–Anything But Christ.

As reported yesterday in my town’s “community announcements” paper, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church “will sponsor a one-hour presentation by a Sufi Dervish who ‘whirls’… This particular ’embodied’ form of prayer, the physical act of moving in a circle, is not well known in the West… The program is connected to [St. Luke’s] current exhibit, ‘Spirituality of the Mandala’…”

Whirling dervishes are Muslim mystics who spin themselves around and around until it puts them in a kind of trance. A Mandala is some kind of Buddhist or Hindu thingamajig. And “spirituality” is bunk.

When the Son of man returns, will he find faith on the earth? (Luke 18:8) I guess it’ll depend on where He looks.

But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, Jesus said (Matthew 6:7). I think that would apply to mindlessly whirling around the floor before you wander off to stare at the mandala.

If it were my church, I would not like the Lord to find whirling dervishes and mandalas there when He returns.