More Missionaries

Cal Thomas was on my radio this morning begging for money.  He says that he knows times are tough, but please give him some money anyway.  Just think of him as the missionary to the media.

Many years ago, I went to Latvia to teach English.  I got a job with a nonprofit.  I bought all of my own supplies and even took a good number of supplies to leave with the teachers there.  While I was there, I took my meager resources and bought class sets of books for the little school where I taught.  Computer access was limited and the school I worked at had no copier.  I was fortunate enough to be able to use other nonprofits’ computers and paid for copies I made for students myself.  I worked two other jobs in addition to my nonprofit job in order to pay for all of this.  I went into debt.  I never asked another person for money — ever.

After I came back, one of my brother’s friends from junior high and high school decided he wanted to be a missionary.  He sent everyone he knew letters begging for them to give him money for a missionary trip to — get this — Prague.  He needed a computer.   He needed a car.  He needed a nice place to stay.  He needed clothes.  All so he could go to Prague.

I guess he got enough money to get by.  After he returned from Prague, he went to work for Tom Craddick.  And that’s one way the missionary wheel turns.  I’m sure there are others.

One example could be the Saturday revelation that the Christians have decided that someone can’t be mayor of our city because she is a lesbian.  They worry about “the gays” taking over city hall.”  I am so very tired of these people.  Never mind that Annice Parker has a track record with our city of service — very good service.  And never mind that these same people failed to support their candidate during the regular election (they trashed their candidate instead the day after).

I’m no missionary, but I think you guys are doing it wrong.

Proselytizing

With what happened at Fort Hood, and the relentless stream of scary Muslim stories in the U.S. — tonight a report on the local news that some Mosques here are sending money back to Iran, I just have to point and laugh.

For a long time, churches here in the U.S. have been funding people to spread out around the world to proselytize. When I was a pre-teen, my mom’s church was where I discovered Africa — through its program to send missionaries there.

With the fall of the former Soviet Union, missionaries flooded Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics. I can’t tell you how many of my students in Latvia practiced their English with Mormons around pool tables. And the other Christians were there, too.

So why is anyone surprised that Muslims are proselytizing here in the U.S.? Why worry that there are Muslims in our armed forces? Why be concerned about growing Muslim populations?

I admit I am an innocent bystander. I don’t really care what crazy omniscient being you believe in, and none of them will convince me that their God is the one, but I still find it calmly humorous that now Christians are getting bent about Muslims horning in on their turf. Religions are funny that way.

Dylan Gwinn from Local Traffic Reports to Big Time Talk Radio

I finally found this guy on the intertubes.  He’s done traffic for KTRH and has a you tube channel for his traffic videos.  His blog is nonexistent (you could buy if you want). He hasn’t done anything on his website for 2 1/2 years.  He does have the St. Ronny worship covered, as well as his liberal hate on.

(I’m listening to him right now — he’s full-tilt Obama is the problem, everything is his fault.  He’s also got a pretty good white man whine going about how he can’t speak his mind or that people knew about the shooter at Fort Hood yesterday couldn’t say anything to stop this before it happened.  Also, there’s the predictable anti-Muslim nonsense.)

Here are the podcasts from his show from yesterday (November 5th 3:00 and 4:00 p.m.).  For whatever reason, they couldn’t get his name right.  He should look into that.

Two things to listen for:  from the first hour — towards the end– Gwinn reads from an article about a mayor who suggests paying people not to have children as a solution for problem parents.  “AN outspoken Kiwi politician has proposed a new solution to the country’s child abuse problem – pay the “appalling underclass” not to breed.”  After a rambling and convoluted rant connecting this mayor’s suggestion to “death panels” and health reform, he states that he doesn’t know where Kiwi is. (rim shot)

The second thing:  from the second hour — right at the beginning — a woman calls in bellyaching about how President Obama started giving his closing remarks to a Native American Conference at the White House instead of immediately talking about what had happened at Fort Hood.  The woman is so pissed that she gets everything wrong (she thought he was talking about the health care bill, and that he was praising people working on health care).  Gwinn doesn’t check his facts, but jumps in with both feet and ad libs outrage.

Later on in the second hour he responds to a caller pointing a finger at the private companies making the flu vaccines as having some responsibility for the delays in getting them out.  Gwinn turns around and tells her, no.  It’s Obama’s fault because he ordered single dose vaccines instead of double dose and that’s what slowed everything down.  This is nonsense.

(Gees, here at the end of his show, he’s accusing liberals of hating America.)

So, my critique of what I heard, Gwinn is scattered — and stale.  He’s just regurgitating the same old things and even the way he deals with callers is typical.

Oh, great.  Now Michael Berry is on to continue with the white man whine about political correctness.  And he repeats his statement from yesterday that people should be cautious and wait for the facts to come in about Fort Hood, which he did do, but only after trying to get the journalist he interviewed first to SPECULATE more than once.

And I’m going to turn him off because he’s already said that he’s going to concern troll the President about how he handled his “press conference” yesterday (which WASN’T A PRESS CONFERENCE dumbass).

How Convenient

I caught this on memorandum this morning:

It’s about a woman who was the director of Planned Parenthood in Bryan/College Station, Texas for two years.  Prior to being the director, she had worked and volunteered there for a few years.

On the way home, I heard an interview Dan Patrick had with her.  It’s unclear how long she actually worked there — she told Patrick 5 years;  the news article says 8.  Patrick has tried twice to pass a bill in the Texas Legislature to force any woman seeking an abortion to first pay for ($500) and view an ultrasound.  Not unsurprisingly, this woman claims to have had her change of heart after viewing and abortion through an ultrasound.  She was the one operating the ultrasound wand.  Also not surprising is that the sermon at her church the very next day was about some scripture she couldn’t remember, but it goes something like if your hand does something evil, cut it off.  The last non surprise is that Patrick plans to call the woman in for hearings when he goes for his third try at passing his abortion tax and punish legislation.

I’m skeptical.  The Coalition for Life is just down the street from Planned Parenthood in Bryan/College Station.  The woman admitted meeting with them.  She also claims that the for-profit organization that runs the PP (along with a non-profit) wanted to make more money (because the non-profit part had been in the red) and the way they decided to do it was to perform more abortions (in the news article) or more ‘chemical’ abortions (what she told Patrick).

The most ridiculous thing about the interview was Patrick’s characterization of what the woman claimed to have seen.  Of course, he referred to the embryo or fetus as a baby, but he also claimed that the ‘baby’ tried to run away from the cannula during the procedure.

All this reminds me of what the poor woman who was the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade went through.  These groups like Operation Rescue and Coalition for Life are what make the American Taliban label stick so well.  They are determined to terrorize women for as long as it takes to get their way.

Tales from School

Does three make a trend?  Last week a student wore a T-shirt to school that said, “Females wanted for sex experiments” or something like that.  I didn’t see it.  But the co-worker who did was standing at my office door when she saw it and she went ballistic.  “Someone should do something about this!  Someone should tell the director!”  she railed, fist in the air. (Not really, but she got really worked up really quickly.)  I agreed to “do something” but apparently wasn’t sufficiently enraged, so my co-worker took over the righteous march to the director’s office.

After calling the legal department and having cerebral discussions of free speech, we all got an email stating that we could do nothing about it.  I offered — practical person that I am — the opinion that someone should at least warn the student that someone might take offense.  (The student is in level 2 with limited English skills.)  You know, so when he’s at a club and some girl comes up and slaps him, he would know why.  But I was a minority of one.

Until the second incident.  A student came to school with a naked lady on his T-shirt.  Not a cartoon, but a picture of an actual naked lady.  FREE SPEECH!!!!!! was not the cry.  Someone went to the book store and bought him a new, bland, T-shirt.

This morning I was giving a test when I noticed the T-shirt one of my students who was sitting in the back had on.  In large letters it declared, “I have a PhD.*”  The * started “pretty h” and that’s all I could see because he was leaning over his desk.  I was hoping hoping hoping that my hunch was wrong.  He’s a nice guy and a good student.  Unfortunately,  I was right.  The “h” word was huge.  You can guess the rest.  I warned the teacher for the next class and told the director.  We wondered if there was some connection.  The three students were from three different continents.  The only commonality is that all three were guys.

What’s wrong with you guys?!?!?!?!?!

In another class, I was playing a listening/pronunciation exercise from a CD.  I asked the students to say the sentences like the person on the CD (it was a female voice).  Simultaneously, several of the male students repeated what they had heard in a falsetto voice.  (Like Michael Berry did this evening while he was mocking Nancy Pelosi.)  Ha ha ha.

What’s wrong with you guys?!?!!?!?!?!?!?!?

In the same class, but on a different day, the topic was accents.  One question from the text was about different accents in the students’ native languages.  All of the students responded with examples of regional accents in their home countries, except for the Kazakhs.  NO.  All people speak Russian without an accent!  It was the language of the Soviet Union!  Everyone speaks Russian the exact same way!

So completely predictable.  You see, I’ve heard this nonsense before, when I lived in Latvia.  Like other Soviet myths (Russians invented baseball, a Russian wrote the Winnie the Pooh books) this one just won’t die.

As I patiently tried to explain that Russian is no different from any other language, one student fought back:  You’re wrong!  Another student was crestfallen, seemingly on the verge of tears.

I’m sure it’s the same reaction that the chain emailer dupes felt when that mean old Michael Berry told them that, no, they hadn’t found a 9/11 terrorist sympathizer in their midst, but rather a devoutly religious person who happened not to be Christian.

Pobrecitos.

Should I add a tag, “What’s wrong with you guys?”?

Update:  It lives!  It lives!  In comments to the Chronicle post I linked to, one commenter insists that the date wasn’t September 11th, so the shop owner is dubious.  Dispel rumors?  I think not.

He Leadeth Them Into Green(er) Pastures, or, Flight Of The Morans

Some years back, in a moment of coy candor and delusional blasphemy, George W. Bush announced that God had spoken to him and given him the divine thumb’s-up to spread the Bush gospel of millennial mayhem.  Now, either Bush is not taking calls from the Almighty anymore or there’s a communication breakdown in the halls of Heaven, because according to James Dobson, God is no longer a Republican.  The rumors of a third-party candidacy, designed to put forward a presidential candidate Jesus could endorse, and for whom the untold millions of disappointed and cheated fundamentalist Christians swarming the more backward parts of this great and diverse nation could safely cast their ballots, sounds a diminuendo note to the sometime epic, often tacky saga of the religious right and its misadventures in the grown-up world of national politics.  Despite their direct access to the Trinity, conservative evangelicals have often had difficulty when it comes to adding one plus two.  Now, at last, the veil has been swept aside, the scales have fallen from their eyes and the Republican Party has been revealed as just another low-rent cousin of the Whore of Babylon. Or, less dramatically, there’s only so many rotary club pederasts that Dobson and Viguerie and their fellow sheep can stomach.

The disgust has not been universal, however, and stouter souls like Gary Bauer (no relation to Jack) are questioning how the abandonment of the Republican Party will benefit the unborn citizens who depend on it for protection.  Bauer, who was once delightfully referred to by that arch-liberal Dick Armey as “that pious little weasel”, will remain behind, to continue his ministry in the brothels of K Street and, as a necessary consequence, continue to entertain many of us with his slick insincerity and high-pitched menace.

A fond farewell as the faithful begin their exodus from the mosquito-clouded banks of the Potomac back to their caves and hollers in Ohio, Tennessee, and points west. 

Points Post . . .

if my ISP and McAfee can stop fighting with each other long enough to let me do this.  What a pain.  Unless I get this straightened out, I won’t be able to do any links.

Immigration:  All I’ve heard is a bunch of nitpicking about things actually relating to the immigrants themselves.  What I haven’t heard in the last couple of days is anything at all relating to employers.  Chris Baker, Hegh Hewitt, Red State, Michelle Malkin, the usual suspects, are all in complete outrage mode.  Zzzzzzzzz.  I’ve always thought that immigration relates to the countries invovled and whether or not that immigration benefited both.  It does, wrt each country.  It also comes up as an issue when the conservative types in the U.S. feel threatened or powerless.  The military operation in Iraq has been less than glorious, to say the least.  (There were 14 more tonight on the News Hours — but that is a different point . . .)  So, since the 12%ers feel weak — the frustration with Iraq — they attack those among us with the least power — the easiest prey.  They demonize them — calling them criminals.  They harp on the actions of a few and generalize that behavior/attitude to the whole – a few stomp around the pond in front of city hall, marchers carried Mexican flags, so they must want the U.S. to be Mexico.  They purposefully over-simplify the entire situation — build a wall — that will stop them — even though walls haven’t stopped immigration anywhere — walls have only led to deaths.  (Two of my students documented this in their research papers.)

Something I didn’t know:  Tonight on NOW, there was a report about a bike shop — but not an ordinary one — in the 3rd ward.  They draw kids into fixing bikes when there is nothing else to do.  I think I will take the two old bikes my sister dumped on me and that I haven’t found time to fix over there. 

The Connection — when it is not Red, White and Blue — is place for true religious wingnutery on display.  I’m taping it now, and did the other Friday that it was on.  I should do some sort of transcription of the most egregious statements.  (Context!  I know, but still.  With Jerry Falwell, the excuses have been — take his words in context!!!!!!!!! )  Interesting show as always.  But it steers toward religious types talking about sex far too often.  Now it’s over.

The Green Spot is coming up.  Then Bill Moyers.  I will be distracted.

Work — I had my performance appraisal on Wednesday.  I am difficult to work with.  I am intimidating.  I am accussed of doing things I didn’t do/couldn’t have done.  I still frighten the secretary — maybe it is because she is a racist and I point it out to her. . . .  I get accused of doing things that I didn’t do again and again.  This causes me to drink in excess (not the only reason) and fret about my employment — since one wrong move could land me unemployed.   The whole process is now via the internets and so, input gets cut off.  I’m pushing the limit this year.  Not because I wanted to, i’t what was given to me.

In other work news — I difussed a potential problem/complaint for another teacher yesterday.  Will I get credit for it?  No. Nope. Never.  Now if it comes back and bites me in the ass, I will be assessed with all of the blame — to be continued. 

Back to Immigration — John Cornyn — Texas Senator up for his first re-election, was for the bill before he was against it.  Perfect Republican.   Wait, he thought about it.  Wait.  Wait. Wait, he gave a complicated answer.  Wait.  It’s complicated.  Remind you of anything?