rant removed from my main blog, on headlines:

Lots of stuff going on while you were being distracted by "bridgegate"

The Trouble with maids.

For the poor are also different from you and me. They know early what it is to be kicked in the teeth; what it is to scrape and grovel before idiots with a fixed smile. And to constantly listen to that terrible and meaningless phrase. “Don’t you know who I am?”
Even when the rich are right in argument with the poor, they can still think they are being shafted. It’s a perception that dies hard. One of America’s former great aspirations was to put an end to class warfare. It was  a noble dream, to see each man as an individual; a prince or blackguard for himself alone; to see the rights and wrongs of things on their merits. Too bad that its current leaders have once again come to the conclusion that class warfare is a good idea.

which is why the "class warfare" against the Duck dynasty backfired: Too many hard working people who are sick and tired of being demonized saw the "elites" dissing the very poor good old boys who got rich by hard work, and who dared to think they were equal.

Ha.

As for poorly paid maids: We see it here all the time. But traditionally, the house staff got perks.

Lolo  "underpays" our cook (60 dollars a month) but if you add in all her "perks" she get paid three times that (she is "family" so is always asking for stuff, including school fees for family members...so her family has always worked for our family or works as tricycle drivers, i.e. lower middle class, but her youngest is a teacher and some of her grandkids are going to college).

Chano however is a cut and dried American Calvinist protestant, who pays  better wage to his staff, but without perks, so has a constant turnover in staff, but can't figure out why. Heh.

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Israel one, Iran zero.

serves them right for throwing out all their citizens of Jewish faith.

Ah, but Russia's influence is the spoiler: they need Iran to keep tabs on their terrorists so there is no terrorism at the Olympics. But they want NATO to stay in Afghanistan because a lot of the heroin from there goes to Russia (and Iran too).

Why not just give Iran Afghanistan and Syria? they owned both places 2000 years ago... I mean, if China can grab all it's previous land under their "empire", why not let Iran do the same (Yes, I am kidding).

But actually I really don't think the Mullahs will nuke Tel Aviv: they are too fond of their money and know they will be nuked back. The main problem is that their terrorists might not take that into consideration and start a real war...

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andget religion asks if the Sports Illustrated Christmas story on was quietly dumped on line (without fanfare) because he is "controversial".

yes, as they note: Not enough "hate"...

Yes, he probably lost his place in the team for being too outspoken, just like Pacquiao lost one fight (not the last one, but the one before that) that most people thought he won because a reporter ambushed him with the gay marriage thing,after reports that he had started trying to act like a Christian (no womanizing, no drinking, no cockfighting)...

Screwtape and Saruman

CWR on how good men can be seduced into great evil because they want to make utopia...and how Lord of the Rings and Screwtape letters show fictional examples.

Forget about conservatism, liberalism, libertarianism, and socialism. Voices on TV, the Internet, radio, and in print deluge us every day with the reasons why one of these political persuasions is superior to the rest, and why all the others are infantile, or vile.
The Gospel is the only remedy. Martyrs, bloody and bloodless, are what’s necessary. Jesus reigned from the Cross. We either reign with Jesus from our crosses, as witnesses to generosity, compassion, and faith, or we fail. This is the paradoxical sword that batters the “messy means-attractive ends” shield: “Unless a grain of wheat fails to the ground and dies, it shall not bear fruit.” Our fallen human nature resists, objects, and pleads for comfort, but we must not give in.

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I apologize for being a little paranoid lately.

But the usually placid Anchoress (and even the libertarian agnostic at Instapundit) notes that anti Catholicism is on the rise, maybe I should be worried.

sex and the single employee

One of the reasons that much of the world, and the Catholic church, opposes the Obama administration's pushing of the elite sexual agenda is not because they hate women, or hate gays, or hate people from having fun.

It's because in most of the world, people live in a society where others have power over others.

So maybe there are middle class gays in South Africa, who have equal relationships, but for most of Africa, legalizing "gay" sex means allowing those in control to have sex with those who work for them or with their pupils. Yes, this happens more often with girls, but when such things happen to men, there is a rage that comes out in violence. Add to this the dirty little secret: that many Brits sent their problem sons there, including those who were gay, you see the problem: Not only did a "coloured class" spring up within 9 months of their arrival, but one suspects boys were also abused.

This article about ancient Rome (and the onset of Christianity) mentions how those nice orgies might not have been so nice:

So do we blame the Christians for bringing down the curtain on those merry scenes? Yes, but against a background that comes as a chill reminder of the lasting strangeness of the ancient world. If one asks if women in these scenes were free persons (and even how many of the men were free, for some might be slave gigolos), the unexpected answer would be: far fewer than we would wish to think. Many of the women were slaves. The jolly free-for-all, which we like to imagine as forming a timeless human bond between us and the ancients, was based upon the existence of a vast and cruel “zone of free access” provided by the enslaved bodies of boys and girls. Slavery, “an inherently degrading institution,” was “absolutely fundamental to the social and moral order of Roman life.”

So nowadays, when a rich politician's husband "invites" attractive female employees of companies who have contracts with the government to become "waitresses" at an all male birthday party, it is only that old lefty bishop Cruz who denounced this (and promptly got sued for libel, the women stating he was accusing them of being prostitutes. Yet he never mentioned this, so why were they so quick to deny it? Guilty consciences?)

and when a rich employer assumes he can sleep with his employees, his secretary, his maids, or his male employees, and then claim it is "mutual", knowing that the employee might assent because they are poor has nothing to do with assent?

or when Oprah's famous school in south africa has teachers using the girls for sexual slaves, it is mutual?

The left has traditionally been aghast at such things, because they are defenders of human rights of the helpless.

Alas, now they are so run by elites so they no longer see the harm they are doing.

Ray VanderLaan's bibleStudy/archeology is on line. LINK

A lot of the church lectures on the middle east is bunk, but this one is actually interesting: linking place, story, real history, and application to today.

for example, this one reminds us that Egyptians are not desert people, but live on the fertile lands.