What I Love About The Health Food Store

Besides the Back To Nature Mint Chocolate Sandwich Cookies, the best thing about the Wild Oats is that when you roll out of bed in the morning and decide to throw on some sweats, a headband and no makeup to run out for some milk, all the other women there look like they did the same thing.

That Christian Jihad Thing

Bryan Preston really stirred the pot yesterday with his post taking Glenn Reynolds to task for suggesting that fundamentalist Christians will eventually follow the Muslim example of using violence and intimidation as a way to get their demands met. The thread currently has 277 comments.

I had some instinctive feeling that Bryan was right to be annoyed, but couldn't quite put my finger on why until I read Glenn Reynolds' rebuttal:

Bryan Preston says I'm wrong, and that Christians won't do such things. I tend to think that conduct that's rewarded gets engaged in more. We'll find out which one of us is right, soon enough.

I'm surprised Glenn is trying this lame excuse. Palestinians get rewarded every time they take out a pizza parlor or a busload of old people and children. "Oh, look how aggrieved they are. Let's give the poor things more money and concessions." But have the Israelis started imitating them? Of course not, and for the same reasons that Christians will not.

This behavior will never be widespread in the Christian community precisely because Christians know they will not be rewarded for it in the manner that Muslims are. Of course self-detonating Christians wouldn't get sympathy from the media since they aren't an approved minority with an approved grievance. But it is so much more than that.

Terrorist Christians would not get sympathy from other Christians. Unlike Muslim terrorists, Christian terrorists would not benefit from world-wide excuse making, fund raising, and network forming. Can Christians produce one-off nut jobs who do terrible things? Of course. But that's all it will ever be. To paraphrase Mao, there's no sea for the Christian terrorist fish to swim in.

Timothy McVeigh, far from proving Reynold's point, is the perfect example of what I'm taking about. McVeigh pretty much single-handedly destroyed the militia movement. After Oklahoma City, moderates (normal people who liked target shooting and playing paint ball in the woods) were so horrified that they left in droves, leaving behind only the compound-dwelling freaks. Outside of those (famously anti-Christian) compounds, no one defended McVeigh. No one said "Well, the ATF blah blah blah." The most I saw was, "Well, I hate the ATF as much as the next guy, BUT NO WAY is murder acceptable." The rejection was unequivocal.

I'm sure Glenn was just making a joke and doesn't want to get into an existential debate, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist (or a law professor) to see that there's just no pay-off for terrorism among Christians.

So I Did Learn Something in Jr. High

All these years, I thought it was a total loss:

Your Language Arts Grade: 100%

Way to go! You know not to trust the MS Grammar Check and you know "no" from "know." Now, go forth and spread the good word (or at least, the proper use of apostrophes).

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Via Bookworm.

Rorschach Test

Actually, this is a picture of the little person that's been trying to kill me for the past two months. Apparently, it doesn't understand that if I go, it goes too. I wasn't half this sick with Mia, and it's really thrown me for a loop. Let's just say that my blogging isn't the only thing I've let slide. I just hope this inauspicious start doesn't foreshadow the next 18 years.

To KS Gov: Less Whining, More Leading

As a new transplant to Kansas last year, I voted for Sebelius on the grounds that she's very popular with the locals, who knew more about it than I did. Doubt I'll make that mistake again.

I was annoyed when I heard her, 3 days after the devestating tornado, whining on about how the national guard didn't have this or that. I felt that at such an early stage of the disaster, she shouldn't be carping to the press and pointing fingers. She should be on the phone getting done what needs to be done.

To find out that her accusations weren't even true, really put me over the top. Turns out Senator Brownback, being the sort of leader that picks up the phone to get results, not to call a press conference, rang up the national guard to find out just what they needed with the intention of getting it from the local military and air force bases. They turned him down, telling him they had everything they needed.

I'm very disappointed in Sebelius. That sort of conduct from someone who claims to be a leader is just outrageous.

Much more over at Hot Air and Confederate Yankee.