Adirondacks

Camped and hiked a bit in the Adirondacks last weekend... here are some photos taken by me or Mike. The last two are from Fort Stanwix in Rome, NY, which we visited on Memorial Day.

Do you dream of Obama? Does Hillary wake you up at night?

Apparently, you're not alone. There's a website - actually four blogs - that collects stories, allegedly true, of regular citizen's dreams about the candidates. They're all linked from dream central... but you have to click on a link that says "I Dream of..." and the candidate's photo.

That might make you queasy, and with good reason, so Global Review has done the dirty work and clicked all those ugly links. Here's a safer way to navigate:

• Weird people who dream about Obama (150)
• People who dream about Clinton and need to tell the world (129)
• People visited by McCain in their sleep (20)

And a bonus!

• People whose dreams are infested by multiple candidates (34)

If I dream about politicians tonight, I'm really going to regret posting this.

Hat tip to Stumped

I Need The Eggs

Know the old joke about the man who goes to a shrink and says, "Doc, you gotta help my brother, he thinks he's a chicken!". Shrink replies, "Well, have you told him he's not a chicken?".

Guy stops for a beat, then admits, "Well, I would have, but we needed the eggs."

I feel like that guy lately.

Memorial Day Weekend

Just to update, Memorial Day weekend was an excellent summer kickoff, from Friday night working to put up garage doors (they're up! Thank you Sniper!) to Saturday sprinting through the woods with my brother, to Sunday hiking 19 miles, to Monday visiting Fort Stanwix, to an enormous "invitation only" potluck last night.

Lots of highlights, but one has to be learning to use powdered sugar as a flamethrower. We're talking about 27 cubic feet of flame coming out of your mouth! How awesome is that?

California

Thanks to reader Dubya for the tipoff on an excellent opinion piece in the Boston Globe (I know!) on the California Supreme Court's decision in favor of gay marriage and against Californians. Jeff Jacoby argues concisely:

In American law, certain conditions of marriage have always been nonnegotiable. A marriage joins (a) two people (b) of the opposite sex (c) who are not close relatives. Under that venerable definition, there can be no valid same-sex marriage, no polygamous or other plural marriage, and no incestuous marriage. But if the opposite-sex requirement is an unconstitutional infringement on the right to marry - which the California court explains as "the right of an individual to establish a legally recognized family with the person of one's choice" - then so are the restriction of marriage to two people and the ban on incestuous marriage. If two women who wish to marry each other must be permitted to do so, why not two sisters? Why not three?

...Men and women are not interchangeable, and same-sex unions - no matter how devoted and enduring - cannot take the place of a married husband and wife. The essential function of marriage is to unite male and female. That is the only kind of union that can produce new life, and therefore the only kind of union in which society has a survival stake.

To which I would add, the modern conception of marriage is a direct outgrowth of Christian theology. It owes little debt to Celtic pagan, Greco-Roman, or Near Eastern marriage rites and traditions. Those were all contractual; the covenantal and equally binding nature of western marriage is a direct product of Christianity. Moreover, marriage was originally the province of the church - the state decided to join the church in its marital mission and created civil marriage on the church model. Current judicial changes essentially amount to a hostile takeover.

The government may rightly abandon marriage, admitting its lack of competence to oversee an essentially cultural and religious matter. It may agree to be the arbiter of contracts between persons of any nature - with no restrictions whatsoever, but also no pretense to marriage. Or it may judge that marriage is socially valuable, and continue to aid the church in enforcing and promulgating the institution. But the government did not define marriage and has no authority to redefine it.

The Farm Bill

With food prices at their highest level in memory, do you think the government should be taxing all Americans to give welfare payments to flush farmers? David Brooks breaks it down in today's NY Times.

The growers of nearly every crop will get more money. Farmers in the top 1 percent of earners qualify for federal payments. Under the legislation, the government will buy sugar for roughly twice the world price and then resell it at an 80 percent loss. Parts of the bill that would have protected wetlands and wildlife habitat were deleted or shrunk.

81 senators and 318 reps voted for this $307,000,000,000 giveaway. They ignored the administration's request to free USAID's hands in providing food aid to countries at risk of famine, and the votes are sufficient to override President Bush's promised veto.

Senators Barack Obama and John McCain talk about accountability in government, combating special interests, and freeing legislation from the entanglements of lobbyists.

But Obama supported the bill, just as he supported the 2005 energy bill that was a Christmas tree for the oil and gas industries. Obama’s vote may help him win Iowa, but it will lead to higher global food prices and more hunger in Africa...

John McCain opposed the farm bill. In an impassioned speech on Monday, he declared: "It would be hard to find any single bill that better sums up why so many Americans in both parties are so disappointed in the conduct of their government, and at times so disgusted by it."

McCain for President: let's stop giving tax money to the rich.

Parliament to Decide the Fate of Humanity

Whether and how we descended from animals is debated by scientists. Whether we will descend back into animals is being debated by Parliament. Prime Minister Gordon Brown is pushing a series of bills that would, inter alia, allow the mixture of human with animal cells for scientific research.

There is much to be said on both sides of the debate over embryonic research (verily: both sides talk a lot). But cutting through it all, I believe, is the question of whether one accepts the primacy of currently living adults over all humanity, past and present. Do we accept that we, the living, should alone determine whether and how nascent generations shall live? That is, are we alone human?

C.S. Lewis addresses this question brilliantly in The Abolition of Man. Francis Fukuyama revisits the topic in The End of History and the Last Man, which offers a rationale for Nietzche's "last man" (from Thus Spake Zarathustra). All three see humanity collapsing inward on itself and losing all control over itself precisely when it fully masters its environment.

To these add: when humanity can freely use its own offspring purely for the enrichment of its own material well-being, it has ceased to be humanity in any full sense of the word. Instead of the strong laying down their lives to protect the weak, we will be the strong laying down the weak to protect ourselves. Rather than giving life to future generations, we will be taking it from them. And not only taking their lives, but taking their humanity by admixing them with animals for our own benefit - and perhaps soon for our own amusement.

Thus passes the manhood of Albion.