Christina’s Common Sense

As of today, I am no longer updating this blog. Sam Adams is not paying me anymore, and I have recently discovered thisisby.us, which does pay me. So I’m writing there now. In fact, I already have a post for them.

You can view my thisisby.us writings here. The more votes I get, the more I get paid. So don’t just read, vote for me at the end! And for the love of all that is right and good in the blogosphere (that word’s in my MS Word dictironary? Far out.), leave me comments!

If you’re an avid reader of this blog, or if you know me personally, you can probably tell that military stuff is very important to me. So when I first saw the trailer for Stop-Loss over Christmas break, I immediately knew I was going to despise it. Not only did I have suspicions about its political leanings, I also hate MTV and Kimberly Peirce. However, because it’s important to know what the enemy is thinking, I forced myself to watch it last night.

I tried to keep an open mind. Since I like military movies, I wanted to like Stop-Loss. And as much as I love those who protect my freedom, it’s the truth that sometimes the brass makes mistakes and the GIs suffer. Maybe this movie would help bring awareness to something that needs to be changed.

And it started out pretty well, with soldiers singing Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue,” which is one of the most-played songs on my iPod (shocker, I know). And then it all went to you-know-where.

Political statements aside, Stop-Loss wasn’t a good movie. It just wasn’t. It lost my interest after the homecoming parade and never got it back. I have to say, Ryan Phillippe showcased some pretty significant acting talent in his 180 from Navy Cross recipient John Bradley to simpering deserter Brandon King. It was particularly amusing that he spent most of the movie running from the Army in a pair of BDU pants and a green T-shirt. Not conspicuous at all…

Stop-Loss also makes its main characters into some of the most unlikable characters ever to appear on the silver screen. They look like weak, manipulated wimps. It really should be pathetically easy to drum up sympathy for a PTSD-stricken soldier, yet Stop-Loss managed to render me completely uncaring toward King’s struggle.

The movie’s worst offense is taking the soldiers running from their duty and making them look like heroes. The ones who follow orders look like villains. The only thing that kept me from destroying the screen in front of me was that it happened to be my computer screen and I’m not ready to part with it yet (though it would give me an excuse to buy the Panasonic Toughbook I’ve been lusting after).

So yes, Stop-Loss was a terrible movie and a terrible disservice to America’s heroes. After the movie was over, I ran a Google search for Kimberly Peirce and discovered that she got the idea for the movie when her brother joined the Army after 9/11.

He must be so proud.

Pat Robertson founded a fine university, but he’s still a major loose cannon and I’m hardly a fan of his. Now, I’m less of a fan.

Recently, Robertson joined the Christians embarrassing themselves by jumping aboard the environmental bandwagon with the likes of Al Sharpton. The two have even made a commercial for wecansolveit.org where they get all buddy-buddy on a beach talking about how important it is to protect the planet.

Now, before anyone accuses me of littering along the highway and driving a Hummer just to waste gas, let me defend myself. I do believe it protecting the environment. As a Christian, God has commanded me to be a steward of the environment. Plus, it’s not exactly in my best interest to live on a polluted planet. However, Christians need to realize that protecting the planet does not mean using the government to compel others to do it—and it certainly doesn’t mean allying ourselves with thugs like Al Sharpton to get it done.

And, though I’m not a basketball fan, let me take this opportunity to congratulate the Boston Celtics on winning their 17th NBA title on Tuesday, and their first in my lifetime.

If I told you that researchers in Silicon Valley have found bugs that poop crude oil, you’d probably think I was quoting some bad Saturday morning filler on the Sci-Fi Channel. What’s next, you wonder? “Soylent Green is people!” (it is, by the way)?

I’m not quoting bad Saturday morning filler on the Sci-Fi Channel for two reasons. First, anyone up early enough on a Saturday to actually catch it should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Second, it’s not bad Saturday morning filler on the Sci-Fi channel. It’s real.

Yep, it is. Some of these researchers have found that if genetically altered bugs eat agricultural waste (ie, wood chips), they excrete oil. Black gold. Texas tea. The same stuff Jed Clampett ran across while shooting at some food.

Of course, this is far from becoming the next big thing. There are all sorts of things that need to be considered, figured, and financed before crude oil in the form of bug poop could become the savior of the oil market. But still, it’s a promising solution—and one devised without one iota of government intervention. Advocates of a free market solution to our energy prices have one more feather in their cap.

In today’s world, everyone wants to be a victim. It’s the cool thing to do, especially if you’re gay, black, or a woman. If you’re all three, it’s even cooler. But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about history becoming subordinate to victimology.

Spike Lee (black guy, film director, victim extraordinaire, and Yankees fan to add insult to injury), has recently taken issue with Clint Eastwood (white guy, film director, and conservative) for not putting any black guys in his 2006 blockbusters Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima.

Lee might have a legitimate case had there been black guys on Iwo Jima. Having spent most of the spring semester researching this epic battle, I can attest that I did not run across a single book, chapter, paragraph, sentence, or footnote addressing black Marines on the island. The military was segregated in 1945, so to have blacks and whites fighting alongside each other would have been a big fat deal. Would nobody have written about it? Would those books nobody has written not be unbelievably famous? They would, because back then it would have been unprecedented. The lack of documentation is, to my mind, proof that no black men fought in this battle. That’s not racism. It’s just the truth (which, of course, is racism these days).

If you think that’s laughable, let’s address Lee’s beef with Letters from Iwo Jima, which recounts Iwo from the Japanese’s end. Do I really need to say anything here? The Japanese are the most homogeneous population on the face of the earth. What does Spike Lee want to do, dress a bunch of Kobe Bryant lookalikes in Imperial Japanese battle garb and try to pass them off as authentic Japanese men?

What’s next? Should we alter the famous photograph (over this Marine lover’s dead body) to show a few women raising the flag? Let’s Photoshop a ponytail onto Harlon Block’s head! That’ll make the professional victims happy! Hey, how about a Japanese guy jumping out of his bunker to help the Americans stick the flag on Mt. Suribachi? Then we can be really fair to everyone.

Spike Lee is revealing himself and those who agree with him to be horses’ derrieres. However, he may shut up and retreat back to his millions of dollars soon enough—the Italic Institute of America has accused him of being anti-Italian.

I and those of my ilk have said for a long time that Barack Obama is unqualified to be President for a number of reasons. Chief among these are a lack of experience and being a screaming socialist. Most of us also think he’s unqualified because he’s (sort of) black. That’s what Al Sharpton says anyway.

But none of that matters, because Obama meets all the qualifications under the Constitution, right?

As it turns out, maybe not. 

I hesitated to blog about this, because it just seems too good to be true. Can you imagine the fit the professional race victims will throw if Obama is constitutionally prohibited from being President of the United States? “Racism, racism!” They will cry. “James Madison wrote this specifically to keep Barack from being President!” There will be calls for Constitutional amendments, law suits, and affirmative action measures to ensure that Barack is elected simply because he’s (almost) black.

And what about the media? Will anyone besides Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Shepard Smith even talk about this except in a sense that it can look good for Obama? Of course they won’t! That would be committing journalism, an art they forgot long ago. 

And, will the Republican (and I use the term loosely) nominee mention this in any manner, except to shut up some campaign official who does? Probably not. McCain may be the Republican nominee, but he’s still a Democrat.

Now, I am quite doubtful that anything will come of this. Even if it’s legit, it will look too much like a reach on the part of Republicans. However, it should be investigated. MSDNC and the Clinton News Network need to get their acts together and remember that they’re reporters first and Obama supporters second.

But should this blow up on Obama…oh! It just doesn’t get better for conservatives than watching liberals practice political cannibalism.

Next time you go through I-95 in Philadelphia, keep your eyes peeled for a white sign with fluffy white clouds that says “Don’t believe in God? You’re not alone.”

It’s the truth, and Steve Rade of the Philadelphia Coalition of Reason will gladly attest to it.

Of course, the billboard has spawned a lot of dissent from the Christian community, with some Christians wanting the board taken down.

This is why people think Christians are bigots. When atheists want us to shut up, we talk about free speech. But when it’s our rear ends on the line, we cry and wet the bed. Christians need to let this billboard stand and use it as an opportunity to advance our ideas. We must not let our enemies use it as a chance to advance their idea that we are closed-minded anti-intellectual losers.

Under fire from, well, anyone with the IQ of their toilet bowl, Barack Obama has announced that he will resign from Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. The straw that broke the camel’s back, it seems, was Fr. Michael Pfleger (I’d like to know who ordained him, and why the Church keeps him around), who was a guest preacher at Obama’s now ex-church a couple of weeks ago. Pfleger sounded not unlike the white Jeremiah Wright with all his politicking (not to mention cursing) from the pulpit:

Obama has now withdrawn his membership from Trinity. However, the damage has been done. The revelations about this church where Obama blithely sat and learned these last two decades have shown Obama to be not the messianic figure everyone thought he was. He is now tainted as just another corrupt politician. The resignation from Trinity is not going to help. If anything, it’s going to look like a political move driven by ideology more than idealism. Which it is.

To be accused of “McCarthyism” is among the highest criticisms a politician can receive. It carries with it connotations of wild-eyed Red-scare-era witch hunting. The expression, of course, finds its origin with the infamous Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) in the early 1950s. The typical History 101 story goes as follows: Joe McCarthy needed a reelection platform, so he decided to go after Reds in the American government. Of course there were none, and McCarthy drank himself to death a few years later.

If that’s what you thought, M Stanton Evans stands ready to tell you why it’s wrong. And he does a darn good job.

As I’ve said before, I always like to challenge conservative authors to convince my Liberal Hat of how wrong it is. Evans could do it. Not only could he do it, he did it splendidly. I cannot imagine the patience Evans must have had to go through all that information and distill it into a 600-page book. That may seem like a lot, but Evans gives about 1200 pages’ worth of information in those pages.

Don’t be fooled—the book is deep. I will probably have to read it a few more times before I can make total sense of it. Evans combs through an unbelievable number of documents and weaves them into a historical account that feels like a spy novel (which is basically what the Red Scare was). And if you had any doubts about the authenticity of Evans’ research, he fills up pages and pages with scans of unadulterated original documents proving the existence of not just communist sympathizers, but actual Red spies within the State Department.

So yes, Evans did convince my Liberal Hat that it had been wrong about Joe McCarthy all these years. I defy anyone to read this book and maintain with good conscience that the History 101 story about McCarthy is true. Evans also informed my Conservative Hat, which had a nagging suspicion that McCarthy may have been right after all (after all, anything accepted by the respected historical community it automatically deserves a second look). If you want the other side of what you learned in History 101, go read Blacklisted by History.

The more I see of California, the more I think the movie 10.5 should become reality. At the end of it, California ends up floating in the Pacific Ocean, completely separated from the rest of the United States. That may not be such a bad fate for one of our looniest states.

The Golden State has once again demonstrated its lunacy in a state Supreme Court ruling last week. The Court struck down California’s ban on gay marriage and ruled that same-sex couples may begin to marry by mid-June.

It’s tempting for folks on my side of the aisle to blame the gay rights crowd for this. But it’s not their fault. The fault lies with us. Christians have fallen down in our duty to protect marriage. We’ve given in to no-fault divorce laws to the point that our divorce rate is as high as non-Christians’. And when asked to defend marriage, we stumble and bumble and drool all over ourselves. Is it any wonder the lefties laugh us off the stage?

It may be unpopular, but the truth is that a large homosexual population is not good for society. Since homosexual marriage has been legalized in Scandinavia, illegitimacy rates have climbed and marriage rates dropped. This has not been good for their society, so why should it be better for ours?

It won’t be. It’s politically incorrect to say this, but marriage and family are the bedrock of every healthy society. When they disappear, so does the healthy society. This has been proven again and again. Do we really want to end up like Scandinavia? Think about it.