¹⁸Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

In the other translations, the word sorceress comes up.  What about later when King Saul goes to see the witch of Endor?  There are some inconsistencies here.

But what was a witch?  Was this someone versed in herbal remedies?  That could be a threat to the religious hierarchy who believed that all sickness was punishment from God.

Or verse 19.

¹⁹Whosoever lieth with a beast shall surely be put to death.

Yikes.  What was that about?  The Bible the kids are using says, “has sexual relations with an animal”.  Bookzilla is 14, JMan is 11.  We let the topic drop.

I think it interesting that he put his intellect into the machine, but not his soul.  He put his soul into the dolls.

JMan has a rich and wonderful voice.  He is a bit of a ham, which I guess he gets from me.  He works on English dialects, and since the only one I attempt is Cockney, he has a poor teacher.  He shifts his voice down.  ”Suddenly, Bob found himself covered with screaming children.”  JMan starts to climb on top of Bookzilla.  I know the chair won’t take all three of us.  I keep him from climbing all the way on.  He ends up mobbing on Bookzilla.

He has a wonderful voice.

I remember something.  I remember.  Memories are funny things.  Unused, they fade.  I remember.

I pull up his t-shirt and give him a barump on the belly.  He yelps and jumps back.  We are both laughing like crazy.  I can barely remember doing that to the kids.  I stopped doing things like that because I didn’t think they were age appropriate for him anymore.  He pulls my shirt collar down and gets revenge on my neck.  A bunch of times.

I was sitting out side with him on Friday, at a table in front of a Thai restaurant in downtown Kirkland.  The waitress had taken our order and I started talking about the future.  He stopped me.

“If this is about what I’m going to do when I grow up, I don’t want to talk about it.”

He just turned eleven.  I cracked up with laughter.  He joined in.  I was laughing heartily and I high-fived him.  A wicked thought crossed my mind and I wondered if I could pull it off.

I froze my face, serious and gave him a stare down look.

“Do it anyway.”

I held it for a second or three and then cracked up again just as his face started to react to me.

His explosive laugh hit a high pitched note it doesn’t often hit.  I had gotten him and he knew it.  We laughed for quite a while about it.

I called her on it.  I told her that I saw her timing her laugh.  ”You wouldn’t like it if your roles were reversed”.  She replied:

“Stupid empathy”.

PARIS – Filmmaker Roman Polanski has broken his months-long silence to lay out his case for why he should not be extradited from Switzerland to the U.S.

In a post on a friend’s Web site, Polanski says he is not asking for pity but only asks “to be treated fairly like anyone else.”

“I can now remain silent no longer,” he writes. Polanski argues that the case for his extradition is unjust and full of discrepancies. His text appeared Sunday on the Web site of French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy.

The Oscar-winning director of “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Chinatown” and “The Pianist” is under house arrest at his Swiss Alpine chalet.

Swiss authorities are trying to decide whether to extradite Polanski to Los Angeles for having sex in 1977 with a 13-year-old girl.

The spin is that it was sex with a 13 year old girl.

He didn’t just have sex with her.  He drugged her with Quaaludes and raped her.

The girl’s family wanted to spare her a trial so a deal for a prison term was struck by prosecutors with Roman Polanski.  He fled the country rather than face going to jail.  He thought he was going to get off with a short jail sentence of around 90 days.  When it became clear that he might go to jail longer, he fled the country.  The only thing unjust about the Polanski case is how he has so far gamed to they system to avoid punishment for his crimes.

Switzerland is trying to decide if they should honor the extradition treaty they have with the United States.

I hate spin.

No responsible mother I know would ever do that.  The writers of the show thought it would be a good line to end the scene.  Dopey line, dopey line.

I digress.

One of the characters in the drama is a boy with Asperger’s syndrome.  I have been blessed with two wonderful children and I don’t know what it is like to parent a child that exhibits that range of behavioral symtoms.  The boy’s mother had a great scene where she described the amount of worrying she does.  I thought that was good.  Being a parent is like never having a day off of a very important job.

A mother with an autistic child has been treating her son with marijuana.

With the return of the White Russian, I felt confident enough by Thanksgiving to make a big meal. Previously, a fragrant house often overstimulated J; last year, he dumped his full Thanksgiving plate on my very pregnant sister-in-law. This time, we sat, said grace. J didn’t lunge and try to grab the food. He didn’t stab Grandpa with a fork like he had last Christmas. He just ate with gusto, and, I think, even a little appreciation.

I think that if dope worked for my child, I would use it.

Anyone who’s interested in losing his lunch should read the above-mentionedblog entry by New York archbishop Timothy Dolan in defense of Pope Benedict; the archbishop’s incredibly pompous and self-pitying rant is some of the most depraved horseshit I’ve ever seen on the internet, which is saying a lot.  One expects professional slimeballs like the public relations department of Goldman Sachs to pull out the “Well, we weren’t the only thieves!” argument when accused of financial malfeasance. But I almost couldn’t believe my eyes as I read through Dolan’s retort and it dawned on me that he was actually going to use the “We weren’t the only child molesters!” excuse.

The problem of wide spread child molestation in the Catholic church first came to light around 35 years ago.  It is still happening and the Catholic church is still covering up for it.

We don’t permit countries that harbor terrorists to participate in international society, but the Catholic Church — an organization that has been proven over and over again to systematically enable child molesters, right up now to the level of the Pope — is given a free pass. In fact the Church is not only not sanctioned in any serious way, it gets to retain its outrageous tax-exempt status, which makes its systematic child abuse, in this country at least, a government-subsidized activity.

Two questions:

1. Why do they molest?
2. Why do we not give them the full Virginia McMartin treatment?

I think the first answer is molesters become priests because that is where the kids are.  Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks.  He is supposed to have said that he did it because that is where the money was.  We do not give them the full McMartin treatment because the Catholic church has good lawyers and the lawyers are really connected.

But I think Matt has a point:

We don’t permit countries that harbor terrorists to participate in international society, but the Catholic Church — an organization that has been proven over and over again to systematically enable child molesters, right up now to the level of the Pope — is given a free pass. In fact the Church is not only not sanctioned in any serious way, it gets to retain its outrageous tax-exempt status, which makes its systematic child abuse, in this country at least, a government-subsidized activity.

The idea that men will not want to have sex is a foolish idea.  At several hundred million sperm per ejaculate, men are designed to have sex.

Somewhere underneath all of this there is a root story that has to do with celibacy. The celibate status of its priests is basically the Catholic church’s last market advantage in the Christian religion racket, but human beings are not designed to be celibate and so problems naturally arise among the population of priests forced to live that terrible lifestyle. Just as it refuses to change its insane and criminal stance on birth control and condoms, the church refuses to change its horrifically cruel policy about priestly celibacy. That’s because it quite correctly perceives that should it begin to dispense with the irrational precepts of its belief system, it would lose its appeal as an ancient purveyor of magical-mystery bullshit and become just a bigger, better-financed, and infinitely more depressing version of a Tony Robbins self-help program.

Therefore it must cling to its miserable celibacy in order to keep its sordid business scheme going; and if clinging to its miserable celibacy means having to look the other way while children are serially molested by its sexually stunted and tortured employees, well, so be it.

Matt is right.  This is religibusiness.  The product they sell is self-satisfaction.  But it only works if you can believe that it is not connected to this mortal plane.

It is time for them to be regulated just like any other business.