Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Day 1: Tolo, Greece

Nine hour flight  out of Philadelphia and 3 hour bus ride from Athens to our sea-side hotel. Felt like forever. I guess that doesn't compare to that 23 hour drive to Florida last year...

Stopped at the isthmus in Corinth for bit to take some fun pictures and tried Soblaki (essentiallt Greek steak on a stick). Quite delicious. Food here quite like which we had that night in Pittsburgh the night we visited the symphony: Rice, tomato sauce, beef, etc.

Warm and in 70s (Fahrenheit that is). Tomorrow will involve Mycenae and trekking to the Acro-Corinth the day after.

About 10:30 pm I'm sitting in a quaint little café, overlooking the Aegean Sea, enjoying some rather dry red wine and extremely salty peanuts with some friends. Life is good. And legal.

 I'll keep you posted.

Monday, May 18, 2009

Abroad

Friends,

As I write this, I tell you that I have a swirling torrent of thoughts and feelings running through my mind:

-Excitement for these coming two weeks in Europe!
-Bittersweet sentiment that my sophomore year of college is ended.
-Great pleasure that some of my closest friends are coming with me on this expedition!
-Eagerness for Camp Judson.
- Eagerness for August and the return to Grove City, a place which I regard with supreme fondness.
-A sadness that comes with lengthy separation from friends and companions--missing some especially.
-Excitement for these coming two weeks in Europe!

I will be traveling abroad in Greece and Italy for 2 weeks (returning to the USA on May 31). I will have occasional access to the Internet, so feel free to email me anything you desire, and I trust you will forgive my delayed responses. I would offer you the option to call my cell phone, but it is useless overseas.

As well, I hope to keep a travel journal/blog of our escapades and upload pictures to the Book of Faces as often as time and Internet access allows, so feel free to check back and see what international escapades and mischief I have stirred up, if you feel so inclined.

I look forward to hearing and sharing with you all.

Ridiculously yours,

Sean

Thursday, May 14, 2009

No Girls Allowed: Sweden Okays Gender Eugenic Abortion

Abortion was supposed to liberate women and protect them from unwanted pregnancies. But with prenatal testing and all, it is increasingly being used as a eugenic search and destroy tool to eliminate unwanted types of children prior to birth. In other words, eugenic abortion mixed with pre-implantation genetic diagnosis in IVF—and I believe, eventually infanticide—is transforming procreation from being about having children to about having only the kind of children we want.

One targeted class of this eugenic technique is girls. In India and China, ultrasound is used to identify female fetuses for elimination—a practice so ubiquitous that a huge disparity now exists between male and female demographics. Now, gender abortion has been approved in, of all places, SwedenFrom the story:

Swedish health authorities have ruled that gender-based abortion is not illegal according to current law and cannot therefore be stopped, according to a report by Sveriges Television. The Local reported in February that a woman from Eskilstuna in southern Sweden had twice had abortions after finding out the gender of the child.

The woman, who already had two daughters, requested an amniocentesis in order to allay concerns about possible chromosome abnormalities. At the same time, she also asked to know the foetus’s gender.

Doctors at Malaren Hospital expressed concern and asked Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) to draw up guidelines on how to handle requests in the future in which they “feel pressured to examine the foetus’s gender” without having a medically compelling reason to do so. The board has now responded that such requests and thus abortions cannot be refused and that it is not possible to deny a woman an abortion up to the 18th week of pregnancy, even if the foetus’s gender is the basis for the request.

How ironic: In the name of freeing women, Sweden allows open season to be declared on female fetuses (who, let’s face it, will be the usual targets of gender selection). India and China have at least outlawed this eugenic cleansing, making those countries more advanced in protecting against gender based eugenics than “enlightened” Sweden.

And in the US? A bill has been introduced in Congress (H.B. 1822) to prevent gender and racially based abortions: It has no chance of passage.

No, Mr. President.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Into the Twittersphere

This video clip (link below) is an excellent satire of Twitter and the general narcissm of our generation. I found hysterical, yet probing.
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/03/20/video-into-the-twittersphere/

Note: there is unfortunately one blip of minor vulgarity at 3:21 into the video. Skipping over it will not adversely affect your understanding or appreciation of the clip.

Monday, May 11, 2009

Prolific Quote of the Day

From a couple days ago...

Friday, May 8, 2009

Nietzsche Friday #9

Plato is boring.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

Friday, May 8, 2009

Sorry, Al...

The world in 2008 has been cooler than at any time since the turn of the century, scientists say.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7786060.stm

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Slandering Bristol Palin

by 


Poor Sarah Palin, Joan Vennochi writes today in the Boston Globe: Even though she has no shot at the presidency, Republicans and Democrats still fear her and attack her.

And her teenage daughter, apparently. Right across the New York Times editorial page from Nicolas Kristof’s column on the sex trafficking of teenage girls, Gail Collins tears into eighteen-year-old Bristol Palin:

But surely, when it comes to combating teen pregnancy, the Palin family has done enough damage already. What worse message could you send to teenage girls than the one they delivered at the Republican convention: If your handsome but somewhat thuglike boyfriend gets you with child, he will clean up nicely, propose marriage, and show up at an important family event wearing a suit and holding your hand. At which point you will get a standing ovation.

Interesting. I thought that the message the Palin family sent was: If you get pregnant outside of wedlock, your family might support and embrace you, despite the fact that they do not approve of pre-marital sex and that difficult times lie ahead. Maybe that message is unrealistic and dangerous to teenagers. Maybe it will tell young women and their families lies that will further teen pregnancy. Would Gail Collins have preferred not to have Bristol Palin on stage with the rest of her family? Would she have preferred a public condemnation of the girl?

Collins continues, “Now a single mom on the outs with the father of her baby, Bristol wants a new kind of happy ending. ‘I just want to go out there and promote abstinence and say this is the safest choice,’ she said on “Good Morning America.”

Going on national television and telling America that you made a mistake is not what I call a happy ending. But that aside, Bristol Palin is right: The safest way to avoid pregnancy is not to have sex. She isn’t lobbying for abstinence-only education; she’s reminding young women of the empirical fact that sex can result in pregnancy and that pregnancy can bring unplanned complications.

But Gail Collins agrees with Levi Johnston, Bristol’s “thuglike” ex-boyfriend, that such reminders aren’t going to work: “Because Bristol’s own philosophy seems, at minimum, tentative, it’s hard to tell whether she believes that cheerleading for abstinence should be coupled with education about birth control methods. She and Levi used condoms, except when they didn’t.”

Of course, “They used condoms, except when they didn’t” has absolutely nothing to do with Bristol Palin’s views on abstinence-only education and everything to do with how all people use condoms. Plenty of teenagers and adults thoroughly educated in safe sex have “used condoms, except for when they didn’t” with similar results. Claiming that imperfect use of birth control means support for abstinence-only education is, to put it mildly, a flawed argument.

Collins concludes:

But when a teenager goes out on this kind of mission, you have to wonder where her parents’ heads were. What does this say about Sarah Palin’s judgment?

Although we’ve sort of answered that question before.

How clever.

As despicable and illogical as a column like this is, there’s a reason behind its venom: Liberal America still hates Sarah Palin not for her proposed policies, but for who she is. Ironically, of course, Palin is exactly the kind of person that liberal Americans like Gail Collins claim to care about most. They are, after all, the people who love working class families, women rising in politics, pregnant teenagers, and ordinary folks.

But when those ordinary folks hunt caribou, when their daughters date scary hicks, when their sons are Trig and Track, when their husbands don’t apologize for working an oil pipeline, when their wives fail to abort disabled babies and aren’t the right kind of working-class woman—then there’s hell to pay. Then teenage girls get savaged on the editorial page of compassionate liberalism’s most prominent newspaper.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

From Parchment and Pen:

Today, at 12:33pm, while most of you were having lunch, the Emerging Church was taken off of life support.

Good Riddance.

Click here to read.

What?

Treasury to own at least half of GM: SEC filing

Restructuring could leave current equity holders owning 1% of carmaker

Click here

Hitler? VW? Anyone?

Monday, May 4, 2009

The Times They Are A-Changin



No matter the cultural change, may our unchanging God find us faithful.
HT: JT