First pictures of Emiko

For those of you here for the pictures of Emiko please feel free to ignore the political entries below. You won't find any recent entries though--Facebook has become my soapbox of choice for extremist right-wing propaganda.

Here are some photos and a video of Emi at one day old.






We're supposed to stay here over two nights but Hilary wants us to go home today. We'll see how that goes.

Liberals are tolerant of everyone...

...everyone who thinks exactly the same way they do.

Case study number 10,000,000: Whole Foods CEO John Mackey.

Mackey wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal promoting health-care savings accounts and he said that health care is not an inalienable human right. Those are conservative ideas, and Whole Foods' liberal customers went ballistic.

They're calling for boycotting Whole Foods. The Whole Foods forum is inundated with thousands of raging posts: How dare an American voice his personal opinion! He should resign! We refuse to do business with any company associated with someone who thinks differently from us!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/18/AR2009081803613.html?hpid=artslot

Wishing I could be a Metro vigilante

They were avoiding the kid like he was a leper.

Do-rag, black t-shirt, shorts pulled down below his butt cheeks to show off his boxers, blasting rap out of his cell phone, no headphones attached. Chubby guy, maybe twenty years old, with a dumb expression on his face, oblivious to all the dirty looks he was getting as people peeked up over their newspapers.

You're not allowed to listen to music on the Metro without headphones. If I were a cop I probably could have issued a citation. But all I could do was talk:

"Excuse me, would you mind putting on some headphones?" I asked.

"Don't got none," he replied.

"Then would you mind turning off the music?"

"Why don't you come over here and make me?"

I totally could have taken this idiot. I've been fantasizing all day about teeth coming loose from his bleeding mouth. I really wanted to put him in his place. You shouldn't just be able to break the law with impunity, annoy everyone around you, and then be a prick when someone asks you to stop. And then when you invite someone to a fight, he should be legally allowed to kick your ass.

But instead we exchanged unpleasantries and I got off the train, walked ten feet to the door on the next car down, and got back on.

And that's why I've never said anything to these idiots before. I always plan it out in my mind, and I abort the operation because I have no "nuclear option" at my disposal. I can talk, and I can leave, or I can suffer through, but ultimately I have no control over whether the music stops.

Paving the way to legalization of religious persecution

The Senate approved the latest defense spending bill. And the Democrats threw in an unrelated rider: The Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act. The MSHCA widens hate crimes to include crimes committed against people because of their sexual orientation.

I believe that no crimes should be committed against anyone. I believe that people should not hate other people, and that they should not act out of hate. But I oppose the MSHCA for four reasons:

1. The MSHCA is entirely unrelated to defense spending and should therefore be presented as a separate bill and given an up-or-down vote based on its own merits. As it stands, the Democrats just wanted to attach controversial legislation to a must-pass bill. The MSHCA failed the four previous times that it was proposed.

2. The MSHCA gives special victim status to homosexuals, making crimes targeting homosexuals (as in all hate crimes) a more grievous offense carrying a harsher penalty. If we believe in equality under the law, then we need to erase hate crimes from our laws because hate crime legislation makes some victims more important than other victims. The bill also authorizes federal funds to assist in the prosecution of hate crimes--once again creating a special class of victims who get federal assistance while other victims go unaided.

3. The MSHCA opens the door to controlling religious thought and speech. As of yet, the MSHCA only prohibits speech that would incite violence against homosexuals--but that type of speech is already prohibited. You're not allowed to incite violence against anyone. The only reason why you would need to specifically single out homosexuals here is to set a precedent for later expansion of definitions of prohibited speech.

4. The MSHCA is just one more example of the federal government overstepping its constitutionally defined limits. I can at least understand the context in which original hate crime legislation passed--when some states unabashedly miscarried justice for minorities, forcing the federal government to interfere. But when we don't have an emergency requiring federal involvement, the federal government should stay out, and we should repeal the emergency provisions that allowed the feds to overstep their bounds in the past.

NY Times Review of Twilight

I haven't followed the books. Before today I had no reason at all to care about Twilight. But then I read the New York Times review and I think I need to take a stand, even before having seen the film.

Basically, the Times insulted my sense of morality. It started like this: Vampires kill people and suck their blood, but really it's all a metaphor for having sex. The vampire is probably conflicted, doesn't want to suck blood, but he feels an uncontrollable urge, and eventually he gives in. So if drinking blood is like having sex, then Twilight is the vampire movie for the chastity crowd.

OK. Simple enough. (And as I explained this to Hilary, she said, "Well yeah, the vampire's a vegetarian." Oh. Is the metaphor really that well understood? I had never thought about it. And plus, she tells me that the author is LDS. Oh. Am I really that disconnected?) But then the reviewer said that the movie was totally lacking precisely because the vampire doesn't kill the girl or have sex with her.

The reviewer didn't use those exact words, but that's what she was saying. She was saying, "Teenagers have sex. That's what teenagers do. Why make a movie about teenagers who don't have sex?"

Maybe I'm putting words in her mouth, but I really think that's the message she was trying to convey. Maybe one of you can tell me what you think.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/movies/21twil.html

Reading, reading, reading

I must have the most boring pleasure-reading menu on the planet. The last several books I've read have all been non-fiction:

The Omnivore's Dilemma
Boys Adrift
The Siege of Mecca
Class 11
(Plus a bone-dry 800+ page textbook)


And you know what? I've read all of those in the last 3 months. And in addition to those, I read The Fist of God, which is fiction set during the first Gulf War. And that's all in addition to what I have to read at work and the newspaper that I read every morning.

I've never been an avid reader. I can't even remember reading an entire book in college--mostly I got by just taking notes during lectures and divvying up assignments in study groups.

The only reason why I'm reading so much now is that I have a total of 3 hours on the Metro each day. But why am I drawn to non-fiction? I wonder if I'll keep reading when I move out to Herndon.

Latest Issue of the Washingtonian

The newest issue is now out on shelves. My story is on the last page. I took a few copies of the magazine to church and everyone was very excited to see the article. And Matthew the photographer was nice enough to put up some extra pictures for us.

http://www.matthewworden.com/Nate/

...Unfortunately, it looks like that link is no longer valid. I hope you all got the pictures you wanted.