Author: Fuzzy Curmudgeon

…would be doing the people in these places a favor.
(But Iraq needs to go first.)
Link via the Professor.

Collegiate themed caskets.
Make mine pine, thanks.

Doctor says I’m a fine specimen of over-40 humanity. Blood pressure acceptable, back getting better, need to lose weight. No damn sense of humor about weight in the medical profession.
Anyway, between that and installing the new laser printer, I’ve not had time to do much else today.
Oh, and in the process of installing the LJ, I knocked the power cord loose from the Linux box, which is why the blog has been down for a few hours — I just noticed it when I sat down and tried to log in. Oh well.

…too busy today. Go take a look at this blog while you’re waiting for more from my keyboard.
I might post later but I might not.

Scalia is speaking out about these recent stupid church/state decisions.

Although the Constitution says the government cannot “establish” or promote religion, the framers did not intend for God to be stripped from public life, Scalia said Sunday at a religious ceremony.

Absolutely.

Jonah in defense of the Skeptical Environmentalist.
I read this book, cover to cover, and it made a GREAT deal of sense to me. I wish my dad had lived long enough to read it, because he would have been nodding thoughtfully throughout, and saying, “I was saying that thirty years ago but nobody would listen to me.”
Global warming, my ass. I still remember global cooling. And where I live at the moment, I’m a lot more ready to believe the latter than I am the former.

Essentially the theme of this article by David Hogberg.
The man is not stupid. He’s got a Harvard MBA, and no matter how little I think of Harvard, that’s not an easy thing to get. Moreover, as far as I’m aware, your Daddy can’t buy you one…yet.

I don’t understand how educated people can sit there and have the gall to say that a “tax break for the rich” won’t help those of us in lower tax brackets.
Sure, I’d love to see my income tax decrease to like 15%. But that wouldn’t put any new jobs on the market.
The only way you put the economic blender on puree at this point is to let the people who make most of the money (and pay most of the taxes) keep more of what they make. Otherwise there’s no incentive for rich folks to go out and create jobs for people like you and me — and if they create enough of those jobs, then it becomes possible to lower taxes for the rest of us.
This is just simple Reaganomics. It worked in the 1980s and it would work now, but a shrill and vocal minority conveniently forgets about that, just like they forget that without Reagan’s tax cuts, the 1990s boom probably wouldn’t have occurred.
What really worries me is that the Fed is going to continue to cut rates, making it less and less desirable for Joe Blow to save money (and frankly at rates under 1%, it makes no sense for me to keep money in savings except insofar as it keeps me from having to pay bank fees every month), rather than pressing for cuts in the higher tax rates (and abolition of capital gains taxes). You need look no farther than Japan to find an economy where it has been painfully discovered that lowering interest rates to zero doesn’t cause stimulation. Japan has other problems that contribute to its sagging economy but certainly they’ve proven that zero interest rates doesn’t cause anyone any joy, nor does it give anyone incentive to invest.
The thing to do now is cut taxes for the rich — the people who create companies and jobs. Because if you cut my taxes, I guarantee I won’t be spending the savings to give anyone work.

That’s what J.C. Adams did. Steven Den Beste has the best comments I’ve seen so far on this.
(Steven also has some great points about the North Korean situation.)

This evening, I have set foot in a Reform synagogue for (most likely) the last time.
While I grew up Reform, I’ve drifted to the right (big surprise) over the years — or actually, perhaps the Reform Movement has drifted to the left (less of a surprise). At any rate I haven’t been comfortable with Reform for a number of years, and when they neutralized the gender in the prayer books, that was pretty much the last straw. Since Sally and I got engaged and then married, and moreover decided that we were going to get married in and join the Conservative synagogue, I haven’t looked back.
So we went to the Reform synagogue this evening because Mom still belongs there and it was the Friday before Dad’s yahrzeit (anniversary of his death).
About the middle of the service, I leaned over to Sally and said, “Tastes great — less filling.” She agreed. We’re used to communal prayer, mostly done in Hebrew, not responsive reading done in English with a Hebrew prayer here and there. She grew up in the Conservaform (or Reservative, take your pick) temple a couple of blocks away (actually it’s a Conservative/Reconstructionist temple, which — if you know anything about Mordechai Kaplan and his Reconstructionist movement — says a lot about why we aren’t members there, but rather are members of the much smaller CONSERVATIVE temple a few blocks away in the other direction), so she’s been doing this all her life.
All this I can pretty much suffer through in order to make the family happy. It’s when the rabbi starts off on a sermon that sounds like it was taken point by point from the weekly Democratic Party fax that I get a little incensed.
And that’s exactly what happened tonight. I heard the same tired nostrums about who’s the more important enemy, Iraq or Korea; will gas prices continue to go up with all this uncertainty; Bush’s new stimulus plan will just benefit the rich…
…which is when I bolted straight up, turned on my heel, and walked out.
Sally and I already assumed, based on talking points we heard in High Holidays sermons in Reform synagogues in different parts of the country within the same couple of weeks, that the left-leaning Central Conference of American Rabbis (the Reform rabbinical conference) has been sending out talking points memos to its rabbis. Now we’re sure of it. I just suspect that they’re simply sending the DNC fax out to the rabbis now instead of making something up of their own.
So let me ask this rhetorical (because nobody in high places is going to want to acknowledge it) question. If Jews in this country are so adamant that church be separated from state, why don’t they insist that their religious leaders SHUT THE FUCK UP about politics? I for one am sick and tired of religious parasites who think they know better than I do what’s best for this country. And the dirty little secret in Judaism is that we don’t need our rabbis in order to have a thriving religious community. Rabbis are supposed to be teachers and spiritual leaders, not preachers and moulders of political doctrine. Quite frankly the only thing we really need them for is to commit marriage, and that’s only because the state insists that a marriage is only legal if performed by someone with state sanction — ie, a judge or a man of the cloth. And if you go have a quickie civil ceremony, any knowledgable Jew can perform the religious ceremony.
The beauty is that we joined a synagogue where the rabbi is truly a teacher, not a preacher. And if I ever had any doubts about joining this congregation, they went away tonight.
And although I used to argue that people who took this point of view were full of shit, I’ve been converted to it tonight: Reform Judaism isn’t Judaism anymore. I don’t know what it is, but it sure isn’t Judaism.