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Three Good Things: 12-02-2006

Garlic. Sheepskin Lined Boots. Christmas Lights that Work.

As I mentioned earlier today, we went to Visconti's in Leavenworth for dinner today. They have a really inexpensive appetizer dish with bread and cheese sauce. The cheese sauce is loaded with garlic, or as I like to think, it has a barely adequate amount of garlic in it. I honestly don't think you can get too much garlic, especially when everyone in the family is eating it so you don't have to worry about being the only one.

We're not going to have to worry about vampires in our house tonight. (O.K., I know that vampires aren't real, but still...).

It was 22 degrees outside in Leavenworth. Planning ahead, I wore my sheepskin lined boots that I bought in Leavenworth several years ago. My feet stayed toasty warm even when trudging through the snow. I like it when my feet are warm.

Leavenworth was celebrating their tree-lighting festival. They have it for the first three weekends in December every year. We didn't go to Leavenworth today to watch the festival. We went for the food, the shopping, and to watch the people. It seems that some people have a tradition of wearing cool festive hats. The line outside the hat shop was long, all the way across the street. Some of the hats were spectacular.

We didn't stay for the tree lighting. Instead we left at about 5:00 PM and drove home. We got home about 7:00 PM, and my wife dug out some Christmas Lights and started putting them on some small decorative trees. I love it when the lights work and you don't have to spend hours on the floor with a replacement set of bulbs testing every single socket to find the one that is burned out. At first it appeared that one of the light strings was going to do that to me, but then with a small adjustment to the plug it lit up.

My wife finished putting lights on the trees, and ornaments on two of them. I put ornaments on the other one. It was fun. I'll probably dig out the other decorations tomorrow morning and put them up in the yard, and we'll put up our main tree and decorate it. I hope the lights for that one go as smoothly as the lights for the three we did today.

That would be really cool.

A trip to Leavenworth (WA)

Today we loaded up the van and took a trip to Leavenworth. They're having their tree lighting festival, but we went so that we could have another snow day, and to eat at Visconti's Italian Restaurant. That's right, an Italian restaurant in a Bavarian Village.

We drove over Snoqualmie Pass and then headed North over Blewitt Pass. Just past the summit on Blewitt I pulled over to take a few pictures...

After a brief stop, it was back into the van and on to Leavenworth. The parking lots were full of busses and the streets were lined with people. I ended up dropping my wife and my mother off just outside the restaurant and driving outside of town to the Safeway to park. Lucas and I caught a trolley back into town.

Once we got into town we met up with my wife and my mother and wandered around town for a while.

We ate a really nice dinner at Visconti's and went through a couple of shops before we finally caught the trolley and headed back to the Safeway outside town, stopped at an Espresso stand and drove home.

We had a lot of fun, enjoyed the snow and the food. All in all it was a great day, if a little cold.

Politically Correct Inversions

Do you enjoy having freedom and liberty? Are you tired of the erosion of our unique American culture?

There are a great many groups out there that want to do away with our freedoms. Some of them want to take our freedoms away while claiming to be fighting to preserve them. They do this by asserting a right not to be offended.

They erode our culture by asserting "diversity", and the equivalent value of "all" cultures. All cultures except our own. They "protect" our religious freedoms by fighting to remove all religious expression from the public square... unless it's expression of the currently fashionable "minority" religion.

They take our language and they twist it, so that a culture of death becomes "pro-choice". They teach our children that morality doesn't work, that abstinence leads to pregnancy. That's a strange kind of thing. Apparently there are a lot of immaculate conceptions taking place.

They complain that there isn't enough money for education, but they don't want our children to learn history. They want our children to re-discover mathematical principles through a "reform" method of groping about in the dark rather than learning based upon a millennia-old tradition of study.

They say that they don't want a racist society. They're so adamant about it that they use racist methods to try to produce a more diverse mix in our schools, our neighborhoods, and our businesses. But when a member of a minority group succeeds by rising to the top in our current merit-based system, they deride that person as a sell-out or a race traitor.

They claim to want equality for all men and women. They don't want equality of opportunity though, they want equality of outcome. A "future-orientation" is called subconscious racism rather than preparation to take advantage of opportunities.

Achieving success through hard work and responsibility is somehow wrong, and is punished through confiscatory taxing schemes. Laziness and failure are rewarded through government "social" programs.

The "equality of outcome" is really nothing more than the equality of the lowest-common-denominator. Our children are taught that it is bad to be competitive. That sports are about how we feel about ourselves and not about achievement.

They teach our children that the struggle for achievement is meaningless and wrong-headed. We "don't keep score" in youth sports because someone might feel bad if they don't win.

Criminals are coddled in our courts because they had a "hard childhood." A show of remorse, real or not is sufficient for many to buy a pass in the court of public opinion. The consequences of our choices "aren't fair" when our actions come back to hurt us. Never mind the victims, I hurt, therefore I inflict pain.

This same attitude infects our culture to the highest levels. It has begun to infect our national pride and our foreign relations.

Today the "equality" of the lowest common denominator causes us to feel guilty about our role in the world. We have too much power, so we must be evil. We believe in rewarding success and sharing opportunity instead of the redistribution of wealth, and so we are called "uncaring" and "arrogant".

I'm tired of it. All of these ills come from the socialist doctrines espoused by the "progressives" in our country and throughout the world. They are the direct result of moral relativism. If there is no true "good" or "evil" in the world then there is no value in accomplishment and hard work.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Those words sound noble on the surface, but they are truly an abomination. They bring us all down to our lowest common denominator. With that philosophy there is no reward for effort, there is no penalty for sloth. To follow that philosophy to its ultimate end is to bring about the death of our civilization.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. In today's high-tech world, the left has managed to create road building machinery of incredible efficiency.

Its time to follow behind the left's road-making machinery with jackhammers and tear it up.

Linked at Publius Rendezvous.