Well the old calendar on the wall says its time for my quarterly blog post.

I miss writing in this space on a regular basis but, for various reasons, a couple of short Twitter outbursts per day is about all I can manage these days.

As I write, the ridiculous “Occupy _________ ” (fill in the blank with the smelly, disease-ridden location of your choice) hippie nostalgia flea circus is still underway and rapidly devolving into little Lord of the Flies reenactments scattered across the country. And they’re finally getting the over-reactions from local police they’ve been craving.

“Come See the Violence Inherent in the System!”

Early on, the “Occupy Wall Street” participants were merely the usual enviro-Marxist rabble who can be counted on to show up and protest any major capitalist event–G12 summits , WTO meetings, NATO conferences, etc.. But once it became clear to the broader Left-wing sphere that TV cameras were going to remain pointed at the Wall Street protests for an extended period of time, the unions and other core constituencies of the Democrat’s base quickly rushed in to “help.”

The robust news attention can be attributed the desperation felt by the liberal media industrial complex to find a grassroots liberal corollary to the Tea Party movement. The fact that many in the media and on the Left actually view the anarchist, know-nothing OWS-ers as reciprocal to the silver-haired Tea Party conventioneers from flyover country speaks volumes about how out of touch they are.

Let’s take a closer look at the “Occupy” movement’s simultaneously hilarious and offensive core narrative–the 99% vs 1%.

No. No you’re not. If you’re spending day after day camping in Zuccotti park wearing a Guy Fawkes mask advocating the abolition of private property, an end to the free enterprise system, and government control of virtually all aspects of economic life,  you don’t speak for the 99% of Americans who earn less than $1.2 million per year (which is the economic border between the so-called 1% and the rest of us.)

This contrived and arbitrary distinction is nonsense at many levels. First of all the narrative is built around the antiquated, FDR-era notion that Republicans and conservatives are the rich and the ranks of liberal Democrats are filled by the poor. It’s the article of blind faith encapsulated by this popular OWS sign/T-shirt:

I say “blind” faith because one has to be willfully ignorant of a mountain of facts to still cling to this narrative. The Obama administration is filled with former principals at Goldman Sachs and advised by the very people that who turned Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the primary trigger of the debt/liquidity crisis of 2008.

The donor lists of the DNC are a who’s who of the mega-rich and famous. And for every one wealthy conservative trust like that of the Koch Brothers, one can point to 30 left-leaning ones funded by liberal billionaires.

Here’s actress Anne Hathaway marching with the OWS the other day.

One of her co-marchers was asked about her views. The reply was, “We’re demanding free higher education.”

And there you have it. The ingredients of this noxious stew are as follows:

• A gigantic sense of entitlement.
• Resentment of the successful
• A double standard that embraces those who make millions singing, writing, or pretending to be other people in front of a camera.
• Disdain for entrepreneurs, a.k.a., the money-grubbing bourgeois merchants seeking their filthy “profits.”
• Utter cluelessness about economic realities or the science of energy production.
• A cheery determination to adopt all of the policies that have the economic wheels coming off in Europe.

Obama, many congressional Democrats, and the media are eating it up.

Update: OWS has lost Jon Stewart! Check out this brilliant piece of reporting from Zuccotti Park. Watch for the delicious statement from one of the occupiers when asked why he won’t share his iPad: “I’m against private property, but not personal property.”

Princesses, Past and Present

Holland Girls

Like her two sisters before her, Female Offspring Unit #3 was in the homecoming court this last Friday night. She looked beautiful and her sisters were there to support and root. Mrs. Blather and yours truly were very proud.

The Problem of Evil

You my recall my series of posts a few months ago titled, “Tragedy: The Mother of All Bad Theology.” (Here, here and here.) They were built around the observation that the Church’s ham-handed handling of “the problem of evil” and cartoonish conceptions of God’s sovereignty are turning an entire generation off to the gospel. I was reminded of that when I read this little tidbit about the late Steve Jobs:

When Jobs was 13, he saw starving children on the cover of Life magazine.  He asked his Sunday school teacher if God knew what would happen to the children. After that he never returned to church and he never went back to Christianity.

Man Stuff

It Really is 1979 Again

All he does it eat, sleep, poop and cry. I think he’s one of those ‘occupy’ protesters.

I’m posting something to the blog. It lives!

Actually, don’t bother alerting the media. They’re obsessed with following the pronouncements of a few thousand unwashed anarchists, unrepentant Maoists, and clueless slackers with giant senses of entitlement claiming to represent you, me and the rest of the non-super-wealthy 99% of U.S. citizenry.

Note the yellow sign above which reads:

Capitalism is Organized Crime. The Whole System Has Got to Go.

Okay. And we should replace capitalism with . . . what precisely?

That particularly sign points to the web site PSLweb.org, which is the official home of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. A review of their literature suggests they would replace capitalism with something akin to Mao’s dictatorship of the proletariat and Cultural Revolution which resulted in the deaths of at least 30 million.

Puts me in mind of something Paul Harvey once said:

Capitalism has been our good servant. But some would trade a good servant for a bad master.

There is much hand-wringing about the “Zionist” “occupation” or “Palastine” in this group’s literature as well. Which brings me to . . .

It’s been amusing to contrast the media’s coverage of the Occupy Wall Street with they way they were reporting on Tea Party gatherings last year.

Whenever a large group of Tea Party activists gathered, deeply troubled reporters invariably perceived racism lurking beneath the surface, regardless of how diverse the crowd.

While the press apparently has amazing powers to perceive invisible racism wherever average working Americans gather to call for smaller, less intrusive government–they are willfully blind to blatant anti-Semitism being paraded before them at the OWS protests.

For more than 40 years we’ve been watching public service announcements exhorting us to “buckle up for safety.” We’ve seen terrifying post-crash photos with somber-voiced narrators and talking crash test dummies.

Frankly, I would have thought it impossible to come up with an utterly fresh way to promote seatbelt use. But this last week I saw spot from the UK that was not only different but possibly the most effective such spot I’ve ever seen. And there’s not a car in sight . . .

Embrace Life

Fastening your seatbelt is a “what.” Staying alive for the people who love and need you is a “why.” Whys are always more powerful that Whats. That’s what makes this little bit of message delivery so compelling.

#####

Now on to music.

I’m a fan of electric blues. Several years ago I discovered a female blues guitarist/vocalist that just blew me away. Susan Tedeschsi’s smoky voice goes places that Bonnie Raitt’s only hinted at. Raitt is a better blues guitarist. But Tedeshci’s voice is a wonder.

A couple of years ago Tedeschi married an amazing blues slide guitar player named Derek Trucks. Their marital merger resulted in a blues super-group–The Tedeschi-Trucks band. Here they are at Eric Clapton’s “Crossroads” guitar festival playing a song off of their first album.

It’s my current favorite (non-Christian) song. Enjoy . . .

Tedeschi-Trucks: It\’s Midnight in Harlem

At some point in the next few overnight hours, the temperature here will drop below 70 degrees for the first time in about three months. Our long, monotonous string on 105-ish degree afternoons and 88 degree mornings is about to come to an end.

Cooler, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean “wetter.” And we remain in desperate need of rain. Here’s the view from our balcony:

If only to get something fresh posted to the blog, here are a few images I captured during my time in Angola (with some sporadic commentary).

The Baobab trees are freakishly large. This is far from the largest specimen I saw there. It’s just one I was able to get close to.

Little Women at the Well. This girls are surrounding a water well drilled by the ministry I was working with in Angola. Prior to this well being drilled, they had to dig holes in a dry riverbed in the dry season to obtain water.

Videographer Kyle Davis takes advantage of the wonderful late afternoon light. Off in the distance, a rock formation I dubbed (in my own mind) Mt. Viagra.

This is how Angolan kids line up for food. Orderly, obedient, patient. And very tightly packed.

We met a sweet young woman who lost the use of her legs to polio as a toddler. Her vintage hand-powered chair struck me as a piece of sad art.

One of the saddest situations I saw (and that’s saying something) involved a group of people whose village (hundreds of miles away) had flooded during the rainy season several months earlier. The government had relocated these people by helicopter to this strange place and left them there to fend for themselves. They cobbled together houses out of whatever they could scrounge.

Not sure how to describe the terrain of Angola. How about “beautifully severe.” Or perhaps “severely beautiful.”

Okay, it wasn’t really a vacation. Haven’t had one of those in about three years. But as they say, a change is as good as a rest. And my 10 days in Angola recently certainly qualifies as a change.

I was a writer attached to a video crew and still photographer documenting the work of a wonderful Christian aid ministry in Angola. Getting there required a 9-hour flight to London, a 7-hour layover, and then a 8-hour flight to Luanda–Angola’s capital city. We were traveling on a non-profit budget so the accommodations in Luanda were, shall we say, spartan. Here’s a couple of  shots from my hotel room window:

That water in the street . . . that would be a sewage leak. We only spent one night in Luanda. The next morning we drove seven hours south along the coast to the city of Benguela. A hotel there would be our base camp for the next six days.

Each day brought a long, arduous drive on bad roads to a remote village. I saw things I wish I could un-see:

There were lots of fun moments as well. For example, I brought my iPad and quickly found that I could use it to mesmerize the children of a village. For example, there were no mirrors in these villages. Outside of catching their reflection in a bucket of water,  these children there had never seen themselves. As a result, I learned that I could take the front-facing camera on my iPad and work some magic. Allow me to illustrate:

Getting home proved to be a challenge. Due to back to back mechanical failures with a British Airways flight, we ended up requiring about 70 hours of travel to get home, sleeping in airports and airplanes. I wanted to kiss the ground when we landed at Raliegh-Durham.

Nevertheless, one of my favorite things is traveling to a place and culture I’ve never experienced before. And this trip to Angola was rich in countless ways.

Traveled with Mrs. Blather and FOU#3 to southeastern Oklahoma last night to spend a few days with Mom at the old homestead. Mom will be 80 on Sunday.

As regular readers know, Dad passed away last October so Mom is in that cycle of sad firsts. First Christmas without Dad. First wedding anniversary. His birthday came and went last month. And now a major milestone birthday for her.

She’s doing well. Still very engaged in her church and community, in spite of some mobility challenges and an obnoxious hand tremor that has tried to rob her of one her favorite ministries–writing encouraging notes and cards.

A few months before Dad passed away–when the cruel ravages of Alzheimer’s had accelerated from a trot to gallop–I wrote a tribute titled, “May I Tell You About My Mother?” You’ll find it here.

For her birthday, we’re working through a fairly extensive “honey do” list of projects she needs done around the house; eating well; and were even treated with a rowdy thunderstorm and extended soaking rain that dropped the temps about 15 degrees in minutes–the first rain we’ve witnessed in a couple of months.

It was wonderful. We thanked God for the rain. But we’re grateful for much more than that this weekend.