The Glittering Eye

Thanks to Dave Schuler at The Glittering Eye for his kind invitation to blog as his guest, I'll be ... um ... blogging as Dave's guest at The Glittering Eye. Please head on over, and thanks for reading.

Hiatus

Real life tends to intervene in blogging. With my brother out of reach of the Internet, and other people I've approached not really ready to blog, the result has been a near-silence here for a while. Yet, I've not been inactive: it takes a lot of time to de-spam the blog on an almost-daily basis. In fact, as Steph put it, that tends to actually take up my blogging time. I hate having the blog sitting around like this though.

So the question is, what am I to do about it? The answer is, I'm going to stop updating the blog for a while. In the meantime, I will be commenting on other blogs, and if I find a group blog (or a solo blog interested in going group) that needs a contributor on topics of interest to me, I may sign up for that. I'll keep you updated if I do find such an opportunity.

Only Nixon Could go to China

It occurred to me this morning that we should change the name of CVN-77, under construction as the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush, to the U.S.S. Richard M. Nixon. That way, if we ever get into a war with China, we could deploy that carrier first, because only Nixon could go to China.

OK, it's bad, but it's early.

Pro and Con

A brief comparison of the pros and cons of hosting at a professional hosting company vs. hosting at home:

Hosting Company: You might have a newbie trip over the cables and knock your server offline.

Home: You might have a two-year old playing "trapped" decide to change the output of your variable-voltage power supply, thus destroying your switch and casting you into the depths of "offline".

Guess which one happened to us?

Blood Pressure Rising

When you participate in any activity which is not widely done, and which challenges the perquisites and powers of an established power bloc, you're going to be smeared from time to time. Thus also with homeschooling, which attacks directly the powers and perquisites of the teachers' unions (and, by extension, their political allies on the Left, including many in the media). Bryan Preston at Junk Yard Blog takes apart one such article. (hat tip: Wizbang)

And let's guess who wrote it, shall we? It's Doug Oplinger and Dennis J. Willard, whom we last met here, and who have now descended to citing their own reporting at the Akron-Beacon Journal as definitive, since no one else was picking up on their themes. Ah, yes, the "news".

Tortured Logic, Indeed

Best of the Web yesterday had a bit on Michael Newdow's attempt to restart his case against having "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. I find Newdow's case stupid and worthless and needing to be refused by the courts a priori. I'm also annoyed by James Taranto, though. Here's the excerpt:

California crackpot Michael Newdow, who failed in his effort to ban the Pledge of Allegiance because he didn't have custody of his biological daughter, "relaunched his constitutional case Tuesday" and is now using other people's children to make the case:

This time around, Newdow is joined by eight co-plaintiffs--all custodial parents of children who are students in Northern California public school districts or the children themselves. . . .

In an interview Tuesday, a parent of one of the child plaintiffs said the third-grader has been aware of the pledge issue since Newdow's last case was in the news. The child remarked at the time, "That's not right," and became "quite activist about it," the parent said. The complaint identifies the child as a pantheist who doesn't believe in a personal God.

Yes, that's right--the kid is in third grade and he's a "pantheist."

I wonder if Taranto would say, "Yes, that's right--the kid is in third grade and he's a 'Christian'"? My third-grade aged child, Connor, is certainly capable of having his own religious opinions. For a long time, we thought he was an atheist, since he rejects the very idea of a god(dess). But after a little discussion one day, I discovered that he's actually an animist, though he didn't know the term. That is, he believes that all living things are animated by spirits, but that they are not divine. And while animism is a part of my and my wife's pagan beliefs, there is a definite Divine as well.

In other words, yes, a child of 8 can indeed have religious opinions that differ from his parents', and can also presumably have religious opinions that mirror his parents' but that were not simply indoctrinated into him. It's quite possible that such a child could be a pantheist, but he probably wouldn't know the name for it unless his parents had discussed it with him.

UPDATE: Apparently I was not the only critic. Taranto further explains his position (no permalink yet):

Well, that was precisely our point. If a third-grader is a "pantheist," that just means his parents are extremely weird.

You know, Newdow is deeply misguided and is abusing the rights of his fellow citizens. I detest that, and hope Newdow loses. On the other hand, Taranto is acting like a jerk, by dismissing people in broad categories. There are a lot of pantheists and polytheists who are conservative and/or libertarian, and it's kind of annoying, as one of them, to be dismissed so casually as "extremely weird".

(Given that I generally agree with at least his general approach to political matters, if not always his conclusions, it's not like I'm coming at him from the other side. I fail to see how using ad hominem arguments boost the case against Newdow's abusiveness.)