A Very Productive Weekend

Posted March 8, 2009, 11:36 p.m.

Well obviously I haven’t been spending my time posting on the site, but I have had an extremely productive weekend (for once). Since leaving work on Friday, I’ve done the following (with Melissa’s help on some of them):

Spent an hour at the NRA shooting range putting rounds through my M&P 9 and P-3AT.
Took my old, broken, cat-hair-encased recliner to the dump.
Bought a new (used) leather recliner from a friend and got it moved into the apartment.
Dropped by a Circuit City, just to see the chain’s last-hurrah.
Assembled and installed a trunk organizer in my car.
Took both cars to the car wash.
Adjusted our property and life insurance plans.
Installed security cables on our two small gun safes.
Went to church.
Washed my two bikes and performed some general maintenance.
Went biking; had a nice 30-mile warm-up ride, now that the weather has turned nice again.
Upgraded the operating system on my BlackBerry Bold (9000).

And I managed to do all that with one less hour of sleep than I should have had, because of all this Daylight Saving Time gibberish. You know, if we eliminated Daylight Saving Time then maybe the reduced daylight would help mitigate ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’ ;-).

Scott Bradford has been putting his opinions on his website since 1995—before most people knew what a website was. He has been a professional web developer in the public- and private-sector for over twenty years. He is an independent constitutional conservative who believes in human rights and limited government, and a Catholic Christian whose beliefs are summarized in the Nicene Creed. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Administration from George Mason University. He loves Pink Floyd and can play the bass guitar . . . sort-of. He’s a husband, pet lover, amateur radio operator, and classic AMC/Jeep enthusiast.

Quotes

To be aware of limitations is already to be beyond them.

Freedom can move in only one direction at a time. If a man has ten dollars and chooses to spend it on a night of celebration he has thereby lost the freedom to spend that same ten dollars on some new clothes. Once the choice is made, a person is not free to avoid the consequences of that choice.

If you wish to attain holy recollection, you will do so not by receiving but by denying.

By attempting to measure the unmeasurable, measurement becomes a form of pseudo-objectivity. Instead of bringing the researcher closer to his research object, the measurement procedure leads him further away.

It is a fact, too—although a curious one—that the sale of small arms to gun enthusiasts or sportsmen produces a greater sense of moral outrage in western society than is produced by the sale to psychotic despots of weaponry capable of killing thousands.

In recent years a false compassion has developed among some who hold that suffering is incompatible with human dignity. Clearly this is at odds with the Christian faith, which sees in suffering a redemptive and transformative dimension.

There’s an old saying in Tennessee . . . I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee . . . that says, fool me once, shame on . . . shame on you. Fool me . . . you can’t get fooled again.

If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.

And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, by what they had done.

Penance! Penance! Penance! Pray to God for sinners!

If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.

One may say [that] the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.

Laughter and tears are meant to turn the wheels of the same machinery of sensibility; one is wind-power, and the other water-power; that is all.

Indeed, even unanimity of belief does not guarantee its correctness.

No matter how formidably communism bristles with tanks and rockets, no matter what successes it attains in seizing the planet, it is doomed never to vanquish Christianity.

For it is better to suffer for doing right, if that should be God’s will, than for doing wrong.

In the real world, in the everyday lives of billions of believers—not least of them scientists—faith and reason coexist without contradiction.

Even good men in office, in time, imperceptibly lose sight of the people, and gradually fall into measures prejudicial to them. It is only a rotation among the members of the federal legislature I shall contend for.

Our characters are the result of our conduct.

There are some people who seem to want to ask favors from God as a right. A pretty kind of humility that is! He who knows us all does well in seldom giving things to such persons, He sees clearly that they are unable to drink of His chalice.