Mark P. Shea's Blog, page 1358

Murder Inc and its Political Minions

just care so *much* about the truth!

"[State Rep. Judy] Clibborn said earlier that she introduced the bill after hearing from groups such as Planned Parenthood that these centers might be providing false or misleading information about abortion, pregnancy and birth control. Some women also claimed that they had trouble obtaining their medical records or had to wait long periods of time for their pregnancy test results."

How touching and thoughtful of Planned Parenthood. They are so damn noble and committed to the truth it just brings a tear to the eye.

One reason I'm skeptical

of the proposition that "Undercover cops lie too!" is really the all-excusing paradigm for the goodness of building a culture of lie.

Of course, I also suspect that quite a number of people will read this story and see no problem whatsoever.

Prayer Request

A reader writes:

My wife's cousin has a newborn son that has just had emergency heart surgery and is on a heart lung machine. If he survives, they anticipate several more heart surgeries. His name is Dale Scholl. Please pray for him and for his family. This is such a nightmare for them, and all we can do is get as many people as we can praying for them.

Father, hear our prayer for little Dale that he would be complete healed in body, soul and spirit, that he may have a long and fruitful life as one of your saints and come, in the end, into your kingdom, old, full of years, and surrounded by the love of family, friend, and your saints. Give skill to his caregivers and consolation, strength and resources to his family to see him through this crisis. Mother Mary and St. Luke, pray for them. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen!

Steve Greydanus is a freakin' genius

I'd demand he be given more than 30 seconds, but there's something about the constraint of the form, like haiku or a sonnet, that brings out the best in him. What a treasure that guy is!

Scam warning

So last night, out of the blue, I get an email from, well, somebody who hates me with the white hot fury of a thousand suns, offering me a real cool deal on a freebie movie ticket from something called Homerun.com.

Now, according to the serpent/dove principle, I hoped that this particular reader had been miraculously transformed by divine charity and was offering me an olive branch for the beginning of Lent. But it also occurred to me that my mother always taught me since I was knee high to a grasshopper way back in 1962 never to click on email links when you don't trust the person sending it (and even when you do, should the email sound strangely generic and in a voice not typically used by your bosom buddy). So instead of clicking the link and harvesting my cool free movie ticket, I nosed around on Google and found this.

Sadly, I think the whole "This guy's address book was hacked by evil Homerun.com" is a much more likely explanation for his sudden and inexplicable largesse. If some friend or total stranger sends you a wonderful movie ticket offer from evil Homerun.com, delete it, write the person who "sent" it, and let them know that Homerun.com has hacked their address book.

Okey Doke

Back to yet another deadline. More on Ash Wednesday!

Just plain...

...evil.

People Send me the Strangest Stuff

How To Spot A Liar by Forensic Psychology
Of course, what you want to ask is "How do they know this stuff?" I find it hard to buy that, for instance, 60% of people lie at least once during a 10 minute conversation.  I suspect the people measuring this may have a very odd definition of "lie".  At any rate take this weird collection of factoids and pseudoknowledge with a very large grain of salt.

The Unpatriotic Conservatives

continue to go on and on about the fact that our unjust war will go on inflicting harm on Iraq's children long after we've forgotten about them.

Last decade, I tried to limit my mistakes about world historical geopolitical blunders to once a decade. This decade I'm trying to cut back.

It turns out religious believers...

...want nothing more than for other people to go to a non-existent Hell. I'm not convinced of the premise, but since the author seem to enjoy broad strokes, I supposed I can rejoin:

This makes believers different from atheists, who want believers to go to extremely real death camps.

The main difference is that I know no Christians who want anybody to go to hell (that's what all the "evangelization" stuff is about: to keep people from suffering damnation), but I can readily document where millions of believers have been sent to death camps by atheists.

Now, some highly sensitive atheist may object that most atheists do not thirst for the blood of believers. True enough. And I will reply that neither does your average Christian long for the damnation of the atheist. Now the believer does not claim to be a believer because he is more highly evolved intellectually. Indeed, many a believer will acknowledge he is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. It goes with all that stuff about God not putting a big spiritual premium on being wise and learned. So we've got some pretty dumb bunnies running around the camp of the believers as we will freely admit.

Funny thing is, the atheist is perpetually touting his massive intellect as the principal evolutionary advantage he has over the stupid believer. So how is it that the atheist camp keeps saying such massively stupid and unperceptive things? It's like Evangelical atheists are Napoleon Dynamite with a mean streak: reasonably intelligent, but not super intelligent people who mistake their utter lack of social skills and inability to relate to normal human beings with some sort of genetic superiority.

The Christian tradition calls this habit of mind "pride". It makes the smartest people say the dumbest things, which explains a lot about why Evangelical Atheists perpetually write things like the silly piece I linked above.