UMC Minister Defrocked

Admitted and active lesbian Beth Stroud was defrocked today by a Methodist Court ruling. Some gay methodists are having trouble with this. I'd imagine other methodists aren't so conflicted.

I'm not a Methodist and my big question is: What took you guys so long? This has been going on for years. This is why I belong to a congregationally organized Baptist denomination. If a minister pulls this stuff they generally either get kicked out by their own church or the church falls apart around them. There is none of this years of church court stuff.

My bible study is current embarking on 1 Corinthians. Corinth was a church beset with sexual immorality on a number of levels (prostitution was a biggie). Chapter 5 seems very applicable right now.

I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. But now I am writing you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat.

What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. "Expel the wicked man from among you."

Or in other words, cast the unrepentant sinner out of your fellowship. Once that is done, let them go on their way.

Of course many people will hold that homosexuality is not "sexually immoral". I'm sure Paul would have a lot to say about those people too.

UPDATE: John the Methodist says that I don't understand why there is a debate here. That isn't the case, I understand why. What I don't understand is why it took over two and a half years to resolve the debate.

The woman preached her "coming out" sermon in April of 2003. She admitted publicly to living a lifestyle that is officially in conflict with being a minister in the UMC and the penalty is, to my understanding, pretty plainly spelled out. It isn't like members of her congregation were sneaking around her garden digging up dirt while violating her privacy.

The facts are a matter of public record as is the penalty. Why did it take over two years to reach a final verdict? My guess is politics, the liberal wing of the UMC didn't actually want to execute their own church laws on the matter.

Halloween

Today's the day. I try not to speak ill of my fellow Christians for sermonizing about the grave spiritual threat this "unholy" day poses for us and our children. I just have to wonder whether we might be better off if the Christian media spent October 31st celebrating the anniversary of Martin Luther's 95 theses instead of expressing professional outrage about this "pagan" cultural institution.

Google Video

If you haven't tried it yet, go ahead and have some fun. The great thing is that you have access to all types of video and TV. The bad thing is that it seems to be very beta. It is also shockwave/flash and my copy of Firefox at work is too "special" to handle it.

I've been using this to watch clips of Top Gear, a british car show. Unfortunately I can't find a link to the episode where they torture test the Toyota Diesel Hilux. By torture I mean roll down steps, set on fire, and blow up.

Plame Flame

My analysis is a little flawed. While this scandal is not bipartisan, it may be making deeper inroads into the swing voters than I thought. Why? As Instapundit points out, news coverage is rewriting history very heavily. I caught a few minutes of Dateline this weekend and sure enough they were turning this from "a vice presidential official was indicted for procedural violations" to "Bush lied, people died!"

The Ratings Game

The President's are low. Very low. Now analysts are are picking lots of reasons for this:

• Iraqi casualties are a big round number.
• Someone outed covert suburbanite Valerie Plame.
• The economy is pretty mediocre.

I've been watching a lot of BBC lately, so I'll use my favorite British response: Rubbish.

Bush was elected with 51% of the vote. His approval ratings are sitting around 40% right now. What does that tell you? I tells you a lot of people who voted for Bush aren't happy with him at the moment. So?

So Iraq and the Plame affair were going on when we voted for the man a year ago. As one of the unhappy 10% who voted for the President, let me say that I don't give a good God damn about them. Iraq has had elections and passed a constitution since then and the violence is at worst leveling off and seems to be falling. The Plame affair is partisan crap. The congressional scandals are much the same. The economy? Eh, if anything it's probably reacting the president's troubles.

So what is the real problem? The real problem is that the President has done a piss poor job of demonstrating any form of conservatism. In his first term, we forgave a lot of this because he had a war to fight, trouble in the Senate, and hopes for a second term. But now? There can't be a third term. Iraq is greatly improved, but government spending remains out of control. Furthermore domestic security, one of the things we trusted him to take care of, was proven insufficient by Hurricaine Katrina. His first term staff was an impressive brain trust. With the exception of Cheney and Condi, I wouldn't trust his second term staff to out-think my old high school trivia team.

So we're sick of it. And we can do the math. It's 3 years until the next presidential election? The public only remembers two. Now is the perfect time for us to express our displeasure with a minimum amount of collateral damage to the nation.

Most of this is fixable. Get fixing. Your base is your problem. Make us happy. Stop pandering to a left that will never even like you and throw us a bone. And not the kind you find in the bottom of a barrel of pork.

Investing

Evangelical Outpost has good investment advice from Austin Pryor. It is worth a read.

I'm a young guy without much in the way of debt or long term savings. Right now my retirement money is sitting in a TSP account, that is the federal governments version of a 401k. Since I don't have that much to lose, I'm heavily invested in the riskier but higher yielding stock segments like small businesses and internationals. As I get older (and the interest rates improve) I'll shift more of my money to more secure investments like government securities and bonds.

My more immediate savings is going to be headed for an ING savings account. They have an excellent rate of return (for a savings account). This should get my house savings started.

Fragile Fuzzy Nazis

John the Methodists explains what it is like to keep rabbits as pets.

It sounds like Patti fell for the houserabbit myth. There is a popular notion among some rabbit people that one can raise a pet rabbit like one keeps a cat. ... If this were true, it would necessitate that my rabbits are exceptionally stupid for rabbits. I do not think that this is the case.

He also goes on into detail about the many ways you can accidentally kill a rabbit. There are rather a lot of them.

My parents had a garden for most of my life. For a good part of that time we weren't planting it, but one would spring up in that spot anyway. Because of this we had rabbits in the back yard. We also owned a series of dogs. The dogs didn't kill any rabbits, but they had fun chasing them. I did kill a rabbit once. I accidentally stepped on it while walking one of the dogs. I still feel bad about it to this day, but I console myself with the knowledge that it couldn't have been a very smart rabbit.

Oh, the Nazi part? It is a reference to the quite excellent furry comic anthology Albedo Anthropomorphics. This is a hard sci-fi space war series where the good guys are the Extra-planetary Defense Forces and the bad guys are the Interstellar Lepine Republic (ILR). The ILR are rabbit space Nazis who believe in their own buck-toothed racial superiority. Yes I realize that space Nazis are somewhat over done, but it is a really good series. Even the furriness makes sense.

UPDATE: On the other hand Rabbit Nazis are nothing compared to guinea pig jinxes.

Batting 1000

I looked at my postcount for the first time in a long while. In the past year and a half, I've written over 1000 posts. Wow. Hope you've liked reading so far.

Gun Collecting

The Gun Guy is commenting on the death of his gun obsession. He's hit hard times financially and has had to sell off a good portion of his collection to finance his business.

I don't have an obsession. I know, I know, the first step to healing is admitting you have a problem. But seriously, I own 6 guns: two shotguns, 3 handguns, and a rifle. That may sound like a lot to someone who doesn't own any, but the truth is that there is a lot of space in my gun cabinet. I'd eventually like to add a revolver and an AR-15 to my "collection".

A collection isn't exactly what it is. A collection is something you have just to have. My gun cabinet is more of a big green toolbox. Some are for protecting my home (Mossberg 590 and centerfire pistols). Some are purely for training skills (Buckmark and M1 carbine). Some are for sport shooting (grampy's 20 gauge). The only one I'd never sell is my grandfather's 20 gauge, too much history there. I'm not much of a materialist and Amybear's insistence on an upper limit to my number of firearms has helped to hammer that home.

I do get an itchy trigger finger if I haven't gone shooting in a while though. Mostly that's because I'm mostly a handgun shooter. Handgun skills involve complex motor control and are very perishable. So if you haven't shot in a month, you're going to suck when you do.

Still, the funny thing is that my gun obsession has diminished as my collection has grown. Before I owned anything, I studied and read on firearms extensively. I soaked up anything and everything like a sponge. Now I only read posts about the guns I own or would like to own. I suppose I just know what I like as my experience has grown.

Gone Daddy Gone

That was the message today as Michele Catalano has closed down her blog A Small Victory. I'll miss it, but she'll be writing in NaNoWriMo here come November 1.

Miers Out

Harriet Miers has asked to withdraw her nomination and the president has accepted. While I'm sure she is a fine person and a wonderful human being, she was not an acceptable supreme court nominee. The appearance of impropriety surrounding her nomination saw to that. Not only did she not have any evidence of deep-seated conservative principles, but she headed up the search committee that chose her as the nominee. That doesn't cut it folks.

Now can we please get a decent nominee, i.e. not Alberto Gonzalez. Not this guy either as amusing as it might be.

Cell Phones for Kids

While not as cool as Graham Norton's doggie phone, the Buddy Bear phone is a neat idea and a thoroughly engineered product. My only worry is that your kids might think it's a toy and run up tons of charges, but I believe they have thought of that.

Serving the Reserves

Mudville Gazette has a story on the 80% retention rates the reserves are seeing right now. 80% retention for the reserves in a time of war just sounds amazing to me. Why are they staying in?

"It's who I am; it's what I do."
"Duty, honor, country."
"If not me, who will do it?"

Why are 20% getting out?

"Not enough money or bonuses."
"Not worth the risk."
"Tired of higher rank bullheadedness and lower rank slothfulness."

Check out 1st Lieutenant Bishop's quote at the end. It's a winner.

The Sky is Falling!

I'm not a big fan of intelligent design. I'm not a big fan of evolution either. Frankly they don't really impact my work and I don't find either of them especially theoretically satisfying. Both have major falsifier problems.

But just once I would like see someone actually read a book on ID before bashing it foolishly.

Americans and their leaders will have to get over their love affair with intelligent design . Polls show that most don't believe in evolution. But it is actually impossible to talk logically about bird flu, or any other rapidly evolving and constantly changing virus, without using the language of evolution -- specific words such as "mutant," "recombination," "genome" and "selection."

You do realize that ID does actually believe in parts of evolutionary theory, don't you? ID generally holds that natural selection and mutation are generally not sufficient for the generation of new species. ID does not say that these things do not exist in the universe. ID has never said this and will never say this. Adherents to ID are not so obstinate that they reject easily observable facts. Read a damn book.

If I were to criticize evolution because Darwin got inheritance completely wrong (and he did) or because his predictions about the fossil record were completely off, you would think me equally looney. Those things aren't major parts of current evolutionary theory. Darwin's inheritance scheme was replaced with modern genetics. The importance of the fossil record was downplayed via new theory like punctuated equilibrium. See, I've read a book.

Get with the program. If you are going to savage a line of thinking, at least have the decency to learn about it first so you savage it properly. Otherwise you simply jump to baseless slurs with no foundation in actual science. And you spread ignorance. And that pisses me off.

Ammo Prices

The Gun Guy has remarks up about the current ammunition market in the US. Long story short:

• The massive ammounts of foreign surplus ammo coming into the country is really screwing with consumer price expectations.
• Expect premium ammo to shoot up in price because of reduced demand in comparison to the inferior but cheap surplus.
• Expect more cheap foreign ammo to come onto the market from Eastern Europe.
• Expect American "manufacturers" to start rebranding foreign ammo because they can make it cheaper over there.
• .22 is going to be going up in price.

In short, if you shoot a lot now is a great time to start reloading. Make your own premium ammo if you require it. Once I have a house to put a reloading bench in, I'll probably do that.

On a Lighter Note

Here are some insults from Sigmund, Carl and Alfred. Good ones include:

I like you. You remind me of when I was young and stupid.

I don't think you are a fool. But what's my opinion compared to that of thousands of others?

I would have liked to insult you, but the sad truth is that you wouldn't understand me.

UPDATE: Silly me forgot the link. Fixed now. Feel free to add novel insults on that subject in the comments.

NaNoWriMo

November is National Novel Writing Month. Risawn is thinking about doing it and Michele Catalano has actually signed up.

The way NaNoWriMo works is you spend all of November writing a novel. A novel is defined as a work of fiction no less than 50,000 pages long. Did I say pages? Sorry that is only for the fantasy novelists. I meant 50,000 words long.

That is the equivalent of writing about 6 to 7 pages per day, every day, for the whole month. At the end you are a "winner" for completing it. In order to do this most people work out the details of plot beforehand and then do massive free writing for the whole month. Editing comes later, if at all.

I've thought about doing this, but it won't be this year. I'll be busy in November and I'm not out of my bible study leadership role yet either. Maybe I'll start the outlining process for something next year.

Traffic Violated

I'm mentioned the traffic habits of cops before. Last night it came home to roost. What was my real crime? I was driving like a cop without the badge.

I left work late last night. As I pulled out of the parking lot, a police SUV pulled in front of me. I slowed down to let him in and then followed him through a series of turns. I matched his speed. At the end of the turns he stopped suddenly and then pulled over in the left hand lane. I slowed down and waiting for him to make a move, then passed him on the right. He turned on his lights for the first time and pulled me over.

He checked my ID and gave me a warning for following too closely. He also chastening me for driving too fast. Of course I wasn't doing anything that he hadn't been doing a few seconds before me. If I can't use a police officer as my model, who the hell can I use?

The whole thing pissed me off so much that I had trouble eating dinner and getting to sleep last night. I suppose I'm overreacting, but the whole hypocrisy of the event raised my hackles even now.

Real American Heros

Rosa Parks died yesterday at the age of 92.

Brazilian Keep Their Guns

Despite pressure from the government, the media, and the Catholic Church, Brazilians rejected a gun control referendum by over 60%. Geek has more.

People need to get a few things through their heads. Guns are not just a violence issue, guns are fundamental civil rights issue. You have a fundamental right to defend yourself from aggression. If I lived in Brazil, with that moron Chavez on across the border, I'd want to keep my weapons too. They have a ready made example of how tyranny follows disarmament. They also have a good reason to worry. As Venezuela collapses (and it will) trouble will be coming to them.