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WARNING: THIS SITE FEATURES ORIGINAL THINKING...Jim Croce once sang Don't tug on Superman's cape..., which seems like reasonable advice should we not wish to anger the supreme powers. We do have this duality in our culture: the Superman that is the state collective, the leftist call to a politics of meaning managed by the state, the deification of "we're from the government and we'll take care of you" - versus the Superman that celebrates individual freedom, private property, freedom of conscience, free enterprise, and limited government. We humbly take on the latter's mantle and, eschewing the feeble tug, we dare to PULL, in hope of seeing freedom's rescue from the encroaching nanny state. We invite you, dear reader, to come and pull as well... Additionally, if you assume that means that we are unflinching, unquestioning GOP zombies, that would be incorrect. We reject statism in any form and call on individuals in our country to return to the original, classical liberalism of our founders. (We're also passionate about art, photography, cooking, technology, Judeo/Christian values, and satire as unique, individual pursuits of happiness to celebrate.)


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April 30, 2008
The laptop, it has crashed...
Filed in: Current Affairs

It has all my video work and a goodly number of pictures. Backup is a few months old. Drive is at the 'data recovery' hospital.

Pray for me my laptop.


Pulled by Emcee on April 30, 2008 at 11:30 PM
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April 23, 2008
Canyons Ho!
Filed in: Current Affairs, Photography, Tech Stuff

Made it out to the Nevada desert on the weekend. Back to my favorite Valley of Fire State Park... Here's an image from just about the instant of sunset...

Dsc_0055

That's some beautiful desert there.

I've been interested in working with the HDR - that's High Dynamic Range - features in Photoshop for a while. So I took this shot with the Nikon D200 body set to capture a series of the same frame at different exposures. Photoshop has an automation facility for taking the group of captures and producing a 32-bit image by merging them together... See more below the fold...

...Continue reading "Canyons Ho!"

Pulled by Emcee on April 23, 2008 at 09:56 PM
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So you can't quite get over it, eh?
Filed in: Current Affairs, Politics

No, well, just got done paying for last year's taxes last week.

As of today, most of us have been working so far this year, just for this year's taxes.

That's right, April 23rd - Tax Freedom Day...

All your wealth are being redistributed by us... through April 23rd anyway...

H/T: Dad...


Pulled by Emcee on April 23, 2008 at 09:33 PM
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April 15, 2008
Well, you know...
Filed in: Current Affairs, Politics

Happy Tax Day!

I'm doing my part to distribute the wealth.

Somehow, I feel that I'm paying a bit more than my fair share...but I won't get into it...


Pulled by Emcee on April 15, 2008 at 10:29 AM
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April 13, 2008
Obamanation (Interlude)...Who's foolin'?
Filed in: Current Affairs, It feels so wrong so it's gotta be Wright, Politics

This is rather self-explanatory...

But, in the context of what we've been saying, what else might he be repeating?

H/T K's via Insty...


Pulled by Emcee on April 13, 2008 at 12:50 AM
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April 11, 2008
We are own all your sports!... now it's Sonical political...
Filed in: Current Affairs, Politics, Sports

So it comes out today that the Sonics owner has been lying all along about his plans to take the Sonics from Seattle to Oklahoma City.

I'm shocked!

Now, suddenly, this is the top political issue for Governor Gregoire's political campaign.

Who'd a thunk it? Last time we had the wackiest gubernatorial campaign of all time and now it's gonna be cluttered with roundballs. More the merrier I guess.

Just watch, somehow basketballs are going to be used in the counting of votes!


Pulled by Emcee on April 11, 2008 at 01:57 AM
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April 10, 2008
Obameology...The Next Wave...
Filed in: Current Affairs, It feels so wrong so it's gotta be Wright, Politics

The media frenzy has subsided for now - having essentially missed the point. Since the Fourth Estate is so focused on essentialness - is so interested, for example, in exploring the root causes of terrorism - it seems odd that there would be so little focus on the root causes of Jeremiah Wright's explications and the root causes of Barack Obama's participation.

So, we continue to grind this out. I've said that there are some very hard things to say. First, please watch this little mash-up.

It's one thing to write that Jeremiah Wright instructs us to adhere to Cone and to venture into the ambiguous world of Black Liberation Theology where we really cannot tell the difference between faith and policy - it's another thing to see it and hear it in expressions of faith and praxis.

The clip of Jeremiah Wright is from his "Hannity" interview on Fox News roughly a year ago (from this writing). The clip of James Cone is from his Ingersoll Lecture at the Harvard Divinity School (requires Real Media player - about an hour and a half duration) in October 2006 (so it's contemporary), called, reiteratively, The Cross and the Lynching Tree. The Barack Obama clips are from his reading of his book, Dreams from My Father, from a campaign stop in Harlem in 2007, and a debate among the Democratic candidates in late 2007.

Clearly, Cone's theology does not just elevate black experience to primacy, he replaces the very cross of Christ with the lynched black man. And there's no question that he evokes a terrible beauty in the telling, it is just the paucity of reality that speaks louder still.

Lynching is one of those very difficult things to discuss. There is no excuse for vigilante justice. None. And we cannot argue about the value of human life, especially if we embrace Judeo/Christian morality, because each life is of inestimable value. But what we can talk about is perspective.

To avoid intentionalist interpretation about what we mean here - we take lynching to mean "causing the death, typically by hanging, of someone accused of a crime, by a group of people taking the law into their own hands." I realize that the word is loaded with meaning ascribed in the latter part of the 20th century, but that certainly can't be interpreted from Cone's penchant for strange fruit.

Perspective: A Tuskegee Institute study determined that there were 4,730 lynchings between 1880 and 1951. Of those, 3,437 victims of mob violence were African Americans, 1,293 were Caucasians.

Perspective: A brief perusal of homicide statistics demonstrates with little extrapolation that black criminals kill black victims at an annual rate easily more than twice the total number of black lynchings in all of US history. These are not victims that are accused of crimes that might incite the passions of the mob - they are ordinary citizens fully deprived of their lives by people of their own race. This is true for at least the last twenty years, and if past trending is meaningful there were likely many more murders in years past than there are in the present day. Clearly, in the backdrop of life taking by citizens against other citizens, lynching is an aberration, it certainly cannot lay claim to being the scourge of illicit death for black Americans - that long tail lies with black criminals preying on their own identity.

Yet James Cone would have us deify, even comprehend all of American religious meaning through the lynching lens.

It might be tempting to simply view Cone as some sixties cultist - that is until you recall that Cone informs Wright who informs Obama. Some will say that there is some fantastic leap to reach that conclusion. I say pictures and words are worth thousands more.

By the time Barack Obama wrote Dreams from My Father, he was well ensconced in Wright's flock. In an early chapter of the book when he (justifiably) decries miscegenation, he offhandedly displays a stark race baiting cynicism. It is simply not credible to assert that in circa 1960 his father would have been strung up somewhere in the south for looking at his mother the wrong way. Was there racial injustice? Yes. Were their murders, even those motivated by racism? Yes. But there is simply no incident at the time where a black man was hung by a mob in any event - much less by some intentional judgment of the look in that straw man's eye. What could provide Obama with the confidence to assert such an error? Could it be identifying his missing father with the highest religious metaphor available to him?

When Obama complains about "reading about nooses" and the hyperbole of an "epidemic of nooses" he's mainly talking about the events in Jena, Louisiana in the fall of 2007. We won't recount the full story here, but it is clear in hindsight that the claims of the 'black oppressed' criminals, the pandering of the media and black leadership in that situation were proven fraudulent. (While hardly an epidemic, there have also been a number of other "noose" incidents - some hoaxes, some unsolved, which we will visit in a future post.)

But what is most disturbing is the promise of policy. Obama, after ill informed race baiting, pledges action against what amounts to straw men.

Mr. Obama, when your investigators go out to ferret out the hocus pocus around incidents like Jena in the future, will they go out with the religious fervor that elevates black oppression above anything else, including evidence?

And every single day during this campaign we could write a headline that says "Twenty-five black victims murdered by black criminals, Obama continues to campaign." And it would be true.

Barack Obama clearly understands what race baiting is. Yet, he chooses, when it suits him, to do it. I think that can only be explained by his discovery of power - after being long frustrated by his own powerlessness, his inability to achieve real power with education, his inability to achieve it in organizing - that he finds in Black Liberation Theology. Almost no one will argue with an angry black man wielding the theology of the noose. The white intelligentsia of Harvard roll over for Cone, and the Democratic candidates offer not a bleat to the pragmatic fancy of Obama's debate.

It is a fascinating facet, as a backdrop to all of this, that the rhetoric of the theologian and the politician are the same. Perhaps that is why it is so tempting to explain this all away. But this is just one example. We will explore in subsequent posts nearly identical ministerial messages conveyed by each of these men. And we must contemplate with that whether there is a Theocracy coming from a most unexpected place.

UPDATE: Reworked a little based on great input from Karl.

UPDATE2: PW-Lanche!


Pulled by Emcee on April 10, 2008 at 11:51 PM
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April 07, 2008
Japanese Antique Photo Album (Part 7)
Filed in: Art, ok maybe that's too strong a word, Current Affairs, Japan, Photography

Prerequisite.

Another picture from Nikko...Folio006nikkoimaichiroad

This is one of the pictures that I can hardly imagine was ever a photograph. It has been rather completely transformed into a painting. There's a certain longing that I find with this image. I don't know if it's a sense of goodbye or that we wonder just who that is and where they are going.

Another beautiful piece, don't you think?


Pulled by Emcee on April 7, 2008 at 11:45 PM
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April 03, 2008
So when one of these passes you...
Filed in: Current Affairs, Politics

Going eighty miles an hour across San Francisco Bay...

27_smart_for_two

Is it hypocrisy?

I don't know. I was just thinking that a little slip and it would look rather like a billiard ball rolling around the lanes.


Pulled by Emcee on April 3, 2008 at 12:59 AM
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April 02, 2008
See Expelled...
Filed in: Current Affairs, Science
FREEDOM FRIDAY, APRIL 18th
See Ben Stein's EXPELLED at YOUR THEATER

"Ben Stein has a new movie out. It's called EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed. It is powerful. It is fabulous."
-Rush Limbaugh, nationally syndicated radio host

"EXPELLED is an enormously important project."
-Michael Medved, nationally syndicated radio host

"Four stars!"
-Ted Baehr, editor, MovieGuide


Pulled by Emcee on April 2, 2008 at 02:08 AM
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