A sermon on Luke 8:26-39

This is a sermon offered to the people of St. Paul Evangelical Lutheran Church, Arlington, MA, on June 24, 2007. It's on Luke's version of the incident from Jesus's life where he exorcised demons from a man, and they infested a herd of hogs and caused them to drown themselves.

Readings:
1 Kings 19:1–15a
Galatians 3:23–29
Luke 8:26–39

Grace to you, and peace, from God our creator, and our Lord and savior Jesus Christ.

This episode from Jesus’s ministry gives us a whole lot to wonder about, doesn’t it? Let’s imagine ourselves as Jesus’s disciples watching this scene unfold. We’ve just been on the Sea of Galilee in a small boat. We’re tired and seasick. And, we’re amazed: we’ve been through a very dangerous storm that practically drowned us before he stopped it. We’re a little off-balance and wondering: who is this man we’re with, who commands the wind and the waves? When we’re terrified he’s not exactly comforting. He continually challenges us, asking, “what’s the matter with you, where’s your faith?”

The wind has pushed our boat to this unlikely place right on the edge of nowhere: we aren’t in the middle of the city, or in the middle of the settled farmland. We’re right on the edge here -- between city and country, between farmland and desert, between land and sea, between order and chaos, even between life and death—the city’s tombs are right here. Our little boat has beached here – just our luck, we could have landed at the city, or at a farm, even in the desert down the coast. But no, we get to land right here by this huge herd of filthy hogs! (The Gospel of Mark tells us there were 2,000 hogs in this herd.) Who needs so many hogs? We’re traveling with Jesus. We go to the most frightening and unlikely places and do things that test our faith when we’re with him.

Out he gets, right into the edge of nowhere. Let’s follow along so we can hear what he says and see what he does. He’s spotted somebody over there. The guy is screaming like an animal. It looks like he’s dirty and wearing no clothes. Jesus walks right through the hog herd. And wouldn’t you know it, Jesus walks into the graveyard. Who knows what kind of unclean place this strange city’s graveyard is? Of course, he walks right in, and right up to that man.

Now Jesus is talking to the man, gently as usual. It looks like he’s been stuck out here in the edge of nowhere for a long time. He’s yelling “what do you want with me? Don’t torture me!” He looks like he might attack Jesus. Now he’s falling down, twitching. But does Jesus back off? No, he reaches out; he touches the man and says “what’s your name?” The answer is something crazy – “legion?” what kind of name is that? Maybe a legion of demons have taken over his body.

Look what’s happening! At Jesus’s touch, the man has suddenly stopped twitching and yelling. He calmed down, just like the sea. Amazing. But the hogs are acting crazy. The whole herd is stampeding, down the bank, right into the sea!

They’re piling up on top of each other and drowning. This is awful! The hog-farmers aren’t going to be happy …. I hope they don’t blame Jesus, or us! They’re running off to the city – it looks like they’re going to get help. Maybe we should get out of here.

But, now look at what Jesus is doing. He’s given the crazy man some clothes, and they’re sitting there together talking quietly. People from the city have come out here to the edge of nowhere, and they’re all talking. They look really frightened. The mayor is telling Jesus to get back in the boat and leave. That sounds good – come on, Jesus, let’s go, let’s launch the boat before they change their minds!

Uh-oh, wait a minute. It looks like the guy who was crazy is coming with us. Sure, he wants to get out of the graveyard, but we don’t have any room for him in the boat. But it’s OK, Jesus is telling him to go back to his house and tell his family what God has done for him. And he’s doing what Jesus said. There he goes into the city … stopping to tell everybody “Jesus got rid of the demons that were driving me crazy!” And, people are listening to him. They aren’t driving him back out here to the edge of nowhere.

Wow. In this one day Jesus has shown his power by stopping a storm, and by driving away a legion of demons. What a hard day this must have been for his disciples (not to mention the man with the demons). It’s hard enough even for us to hear this story.

Why is it hard for us to hear the story? Is it that we prefer our miracles nice and tidy, like our movies? Do we want to see the caption “No animals were harmed in the making of this miracle?” Is it the story very different from our experience? Lutheran Pastor John Weagraff, the chaplain at Westborough State Hospital, works with very sick psychiatric patients. He says their personhood has been taken from them by their illnesses. They’re like the man in the graveyard. But most of us don’t know anybody whose problems are as dramatic as that. Anyhow, we diagnose and treat people like that with compassion, don’t we? They’re sick, right? Not infested with demons. So maybe this Gospel lesson is hard to hear because its world view is so different from ours.

Maybe. But I think it’s hard to hear for exactly the opposite reason. It’s hard to hear because we do recognize ourselves in it. Each of us has demons: we’re greedy, we want to win, we get angry when we don’t get our own way. We see the crazy man and recognize a bit of ourselves.

But it’s not as simple as that. The story is also hard to hear because we see the people of that city and recognize their demons in ourselves. Like them, we get taken over by our big projects: raising our two thousand hogs. We get taken over by convincing ourselves we’re OK by saying we’re better than other people. We do the same things those Gerasenes did, don’t we? When people are different, we too push them right to the edge of nowhere so we don’t have to face them.

I saw this happen in a computer company I worked in years ago. It was a good place to work; Most of us were friends. We were focused on our work. But there was Larry. He was an irritable man. He didn’t get along with people very well. He didn’t like sitting in a cubicle, so he insisted on putting up a tent over his workspace. The local fire marshal did not like that. He didn’t respect other peoples’ work, so he was always redoing it. I really didn’t like that. I took it personally when he did that to me. And he smoked cigarettes in the office.

But, the folks in charge didn’t just sack him. (The Gerasenes didn’t just murder their crazy man either, even though they certainly could have.) They found an office for him way down at the end of the hall. Why? He helped us define ourselves. We told ourselves, we’re not Larry. We’re normal. And we’re so compassionate, we even keep nut cases like Larry on the payroll. But we won’t let him interfere with our project, our herd of two thousand hogs. Now, Larry was not like the crazy man at all. He was perfectly sane, just hard to work with. But this is about the rest of us. We pushed our demons off onto him.

I wonder whether the Gerasenes were using the crazy man to feel good about themselves. I wonder if they told themselves: He’s addicted, we’re not. He’s sick, we’re normal. We’re pure, he’s possessed. We’re civilized, he isn’t. We’re good, he’s bad.

Aren’t we Gerasenes great? We can justify ourselves by being better than that guy. We can unload our demons onto him, just so long as we don’t have to talk to him. After all, we’re proud Gerasenes, with our herd of two thousand hogs, and he’s got the demons.

And into the Gerasene situation came Jesus. He didn’t come to the center of that society, he came to the edge. He showed those people that the kingdom of God is found on the edge of nowhere. It’s found where he spoke kindly to that man who lived in the graveyard, actually listened to him, and sent his demons away. He regained his personhood. He spoke to the people of his community and told them what happened. The man was healed. And his community was healed too.

This was a huge transformation. It didn’t feel good to those people. It wrecked their economy. It made them very afraid. Jesus set the outcast free from his demons. But just as significantly he changed the rest of the people. His fearless and compassionate action brought the “good” people from the center of the society out to the edge of nowhere, and brought them back into conversation with the outcast. No more could people unload their demons on the outcast! He healed them all.

The kingdom of God breaks into our world too, also in unlikely places. Our neighbors at the Greentree House group foster home on the edge of our parking lot are among the outcasts of our world. They’re poor. They’ve been sent away from their homes. You only need to talk to any one of those girls for a few minutes to realize she’s carrying demons for her whole family.

God’s kingdom breaks in on their world too. Maybe it’s not as dramatic as stopping storms and casting out thousands of demons, but it’s just as significant. Here’s just one way: one of them told me she’s still excited about the work she did last week here with us on the midwife kits. She said she never realized how good she has it. She said it was good, and healing, for her to think about somebody else’s problems and actually do something to help.

She didn’t use quite the same language as the crazy man when he was healed … but I heard her clearly. She was telling what God had done for her!

We all live with demons. Many of us try to justify ourselves by pushing our demons off on people at the edge of nowhere. Others of us get pushed out, and forced to carry demons for our whole communities.

But Jesus shows up! By his power the realm of God breaks in where we least expect it. It breaks in at the homeless shelter, at the feeding program, at the group home. It breaks in at the graveyard at the edge of town. It breaks in to our lives at Jesus’s cross, and at his empty tomb! It certainly causes some fear as it changes us. Change us it does, as it sets us free to live with one another without demons, in peace.

It’s my prayer that in the days to come, we will recognize Jesus showing up and setting us free of our demons. It’s my prayer that we will receive the faith to get through the fear of changing, and live in that freedom with one another. It’s my prayer that we will proclaim to the world what Jesus has done for us.

Amen.

Allilgator shirts = springtime, romance, invulnerability?

Super bowl ads.

This nice-looking ad for alligator shirts (marketer = Izod) depicts a woman paddling alone in icy water in a covered-deck sea kayak. She's wearing gloves and a nice sweater, but she has no PFD (life-jacket) and no self-rescue gear.

If a person like her, paddling without a TV crew nearby, capsized, her life expectancy would be about five minutes.

This kind of media depiction causes people to die. Alligator shirts aren't good protection against cold water, or stupidity.

Scissors, paper, rock, weak beer!

Now I remember why I don't watch TV much. This Super Bowl ad for a kind of weak beer called "Bud Light" reminded me. A fifty-something white guy in an untucked dress shirt unexpectedly pitches a rock at the forehead of a twentysomething white guy in a sweatshirt to get the last bottle of beer in the tub of ice.

"I threw paper! Groan." "I threw a rock." "Refreshingly smooth Bud Light. Always worth it." Great.

Just so we don't miss the point, at the end of the spot a black guy in a short-sleeve shirt walks by the groaning victim, slaps his palm, and says "low five!"

A quick Google search turns up signs that this Super Bowl ad has been supported for quite a while by a guerrilla marketing campaign promoting Rock Paper Scissors.

There's a newly formed society called the USA Rock Paper Scissors League. It has Bud Light on the front door page.

Their PR people managed to get the Wall Street Journal to take the bait; on March 2006, they ran this story.

I guess I should be happy that these beer marketers had a successful guerrilla marketing campaign. I guess I should be laughing at the humor of their tv ad. But, umm, I don't get it. Maybe I should keep a rock in my pocket when I go to barbeques, in case I really need the last beer. After all, I'm a fiftysomething guy, and I sometimes wear untucked dress shirts.

Imagine God's Realm. A sermon on Mark 13:1-8

A sermon offered at St. Paul Evangelical Lutheran Church
Sunday, November 19, 2006
Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Readings
Daniel 12:1–3
Mark 13:1–8

Imagine God’s Realm!
Grace to you, and peace, from God our Creator, and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

We’ve read several difficult passages in Mark this fall, great looming hard teachings, texts that seem to be stumbling blocks in our paths of discipleship. This fall we’ve heard Jesus’s suggestion that we gouge out our own eyes rather than give in to temptation (someone in Senior Forum asked, “is that in the New Testament?” It is!) We’ve heard Jesus teach that it’s easier for a camel to fit through a needle’s eye than it is for a rich person to draw near to God. And today Jesus takes up the topic of chaos, wars, and the end times. He foretells the destruction of everything that seems to give us comfort.

I was sorely tempted to take a detour around this apocalyptic stumbling block. I was tempted to explain to you how Biblical scholars believe that Mark did his writing about 70 AD, at about the same time as the Roman army actually did wreck Herod’s great temple, casting stone down from stone as they sacked Jerusalem. I was tempted to describe the tradition that interprets famines and earthquakes as signs of divine displeasure. I was tempted to talk about how this thirteenth chapter of Mark is a literary device that foreshadows Jesus’s betrayal and passion, and the ripping open of the temple veil at the moment of Jesus’s death on the Cross. All those explanations and rationalizations are true in their own ways, but they are detours around the stumbling block.

Many Christians think these words specifically apply to us today. Many think these words mean that Jesus is coming very soon to raise and judge the living and the dead. By our faith we know that’s possible, and indeed it’s an event for us to hope for. But I’m reminded of my New Testament professor’s words. “Jesus is coming in glory very soon,” he said, “but in the meantime I suggest you study for the quiz next Tuesday.”

We’re called to live together in faith before Jesus comes in glory. So, what does this passage mean to us? Let’s journey together into the heart of this great stumbling block of an end-times prophecy. On his deathbed Moses said to God’s chosen people that he led out of Egypt “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life!” (Deut 30:19) Let’s take on this Gospel reading together. Let’s face it squarely in the knowledge that it will show us a choice between death and life. Let’s face it squarely in the certain hope that God has already, by God’s grace, chosen life for us. Please come along with me as we look at this scripture and imagine what it is like to be born into the life God has chosen for us.

I have a confession to make to you this morning. I have a favorite gospel writer: Mark. I empathize with the plight of the disciples in Mark’s account – they just don’t understand who Jesus is or what he’s trying to teach them, even though he repeats himself again and again. They’re stuck in the world, even though Jesus is trying to get them to imagine God’s reign. I know I am like those disciples; like them I just don’t get it.

I like Mark’s gospel account for a particular reason. The way tells the story he gives us a little bit of humor, a little bit of distance, a little bit of perspective, on the disciples, so we can learn. He gives us hope by letting us understand a little better than they do, by making us feel just a bit superior to the disciples. In that way he helps us imagine life in God’s realm.

Our reading follows immediately from last week’s reading, remember what happened? Jesus and the disciples sat opposite the temple treasury and wondered over the rich folks strutting around ostentatiously and a poor widow giving everything she had, giving what she needed for her next meal. Jesus has, with his divine patience, explained to them the significance of this incident: free of the self-important distractions she could imagine the realm where everything belongs to God and so she could put all her trust in God’s care for her.

It’s the same paradoxical lesson he has been teaching all along: the path to greatness is through slavery; the path to wealth is by giving everything away, the path to life leads to the cross, away from the imagination-sapping glory of the gigantic temple.

So after all this … on the way out of the temple what did the disciple say? “Wow, teacher, what big stones, what great buildings!” Here is where Mark’s way of telling the story is such a gift. We who read the gospel can smack our foreheads, laugh at that disciple, get a sense of superiority, be smug that we’re not quite as clueless as he was, rejoice that maybe we’re a little closer to imagining the realm of God than he was.

Mark teaches us who Jesus is by showing us how the disciples always miss the big point, and lets us fill in the gaps. Of course, Jesus doesn’t laugh at his friend. Jesus is far too patient for that. Jesus is teaching quite a few steps ahead of you and me too.

Jesus doesn’t laugh at the disciple’s country-bumpkin observation. He does respond by saying the temple will soon be destroyed. He gathers them together again. He sits down with them opposite the temple mount, in a place where they can see it clearly and take a detached perspective on it – imagine what the world would be like if it were destroyed. He invites them to ask their questions: How will we know—by what signs will we know—when the temple will fall?

We know how Jesus answers. He warns that life is going to be messy and hard. He warns that all kinds of wannabe messiahs will pop up saying, I have the answer – follow me. He says there will be wars and rumors of wars, that tribe will rise up against tribe, and country against country. There will be earthquakes, and famines.

In other words, don’t be suckered in by the massive temple, the seemingly eternal temple. When it falls it will be the least of your worries. It is an earthly thing. Keep your Realm of God perspective! He tells them, don’t be surprised when you hear about wars, earthquakes, and widespread hunger. He’s telling them, rise above your tribal loyalties – Galilean, Samaritan, Judean – for those are earthly things. Rise above your status as a Jew or a Roman – for those are earthly things too. He says leaving all these things behind will be hard and messy physical work. Our passage says it will be just like going into labor and giving birth. But that labor brings the beginning of an entirely new life in the Realm of God.

What has this got to do with us, here in Massachusetts, in 2006? Isn’t it obvious? Wars. Check. Rumors of wars. Check. Tribe against tribe. Check. Country against country. Check. Famines. Check. There was even an earthquake someplace in the Pacific this past week. These words have everything to do with us.

These things are terrible evils. We do get worked up when we hear about tribes ruthlessly fighting against tribes, be they rival street gangs in Boston, be they Shi’ites kidnapping Sunnis in Baghdad, be they Janjaweed militias butchering natives in Darfur. We yearn and pray for humanity to imagine a better way. But when we hear Jesus’s teaching we aren’t surprised by this kind of evil in the world. These evil things are nothing new; conflicts and earthquakes and starvation are continuously part of the world’s institutions, principalities, and powers. Jesus’s words about the signs of the destruction of the temple were true in 33AD when he said them. Also in 70AD when Mark wrote them down. Martin Luther, in the late middle ages, really believed that he lived in the end-times based on the signs he saw around him. Also, now. They have been continuously true. But they are NOT of God, not in 33AD, nor in Luther’s time, nor today, nor anytime. Jesus invites his disciples, and us, to sit opposite the institutions and violence of this world and take a Realm-of-God perspective on them – to imagine what life is like in that realm and be prepared to go into labor to enter into that life.

You probably know that Boston is wracked by dangerous gang violence these days – tribe against tribe. Members of rival gangs have been shooting each other on sight. Last summer the leaders of a couple of those gangs – gangs named for city blocks and city streets – got fed up with the violence and came together to talk. They gathered at the Kennedy School of Government out at the edge of the harbor, in a room where they could see the whole city.

See this news article in The Boston Globe from Nov 5th, 2006.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2006/11/05/2_gangs_find_real_peace_in_secret/


In their conversation they were able to imagine a city where they were not at war. So they shook hands on a truce. That’s where their hard work began. They didn’t magically wake up in a peaceful world. Now they need strength, an occasional drink of water, and steadfastness. They need coaches to hold their hands and reassure them, just like mothers need companions in the delivery room. They need the presence of the Holy Spirit reminding them that God has chosen life for them. And with the help of ministers, imams, and community leaders they have all those things to bring them into the realm of God, right here in Massachusetts.

Can we lay aside our temples, our tribal loyalties, our principalities and powers, the great distractions in our own lives? By laying aside these things we can begin to imagine the realm of God. Mark’s gospel helps each one of us imagine living in that realm. It gives each one of us the confidence to face the messy hard work of entering into that realm, and helping each other along that journey. And we’re not undertaking this journey alone. Christ is walking with us and giving us, at his table, food and drink to keep us going in our hard labor. He offers us a taste of the life God has chosen for us.

Imagine the realm of God in your life! Come to Christ’s banquet!

These things I say to you in Jesus’s name. Amen.

ELCA denomination health plan director says troubling things

This news item came out from the ELCA NEWS SERVICE on October 19.

http://www.elca.org/ScriptLib/CO/ELCA_News/encArticleList.asp?article=3455

It describes some comments made by John Kapanke, president of the Lutheran denominational board of pensions. The press release started by saying "the church may not be able to grow unless its professional leaders embrace a stronger health and wellness discipline." He was quoted as saying that "a fairly low percentage" of the church's professional leaders actually live healthy lives. "We must change our ways to keep this church viable, " he went on to say. He went on to discuss how a relatively small percentage of people (almost all ordained pastors) in the health plan accounted for the largest share of claim, and that the people covered by the health plan aren't making progress with their personal health.

He said one thing that makes a lot of sense, and that is that church leaders are in a position to set an example of healthy living for others, and have that responsibility. Amen. Amen.

The rest of the impact of the press release I found troubling, on many levels. Please indulge a rant.

(1) Christ's church has *always* been one generation from extinction. There are lots of forces pushing for the church's extinction. Poor health of leaders is surely one factor, but there are many other, stronger and more malevolent factors. Paul was tortured and malnourished. Luther died relatively young of manageable disease . H. M. Muhlenberg seems (from his journals) to have been an angry and suffering man at the end of his life. Do we REALLY think that high cholesterol and a sedentary lifestyle among pastors is going to bring down the church?

(2) Yes, health insurance rates are spiraling outrageously. Do we really think this is just a problem for pastors and church treasurers? People sitting in the pews in the church where I'm serving as intern have seen THEIR jobs outsourced to India, China, and other places where health care costs aren't as high. Now they're either drawing down their savings to pay health insurance, or they're using public hospitals. Other enterprises have struggled with this issue for years too. Companies put in health clubs. They offer blood pressure clinics, they beg people to get in better shape, they put hand sanitizer in the bathrooms and lunchrooms, etc etc. None of this stuff makes any difference. The only thing that does help keep rates down is immoral and illegal: don't hire older or unhealthy people, and find excuses to fire them when they get old or sick.

(3) Exhorting people to better lifestyles privatizes and personalizes the issue of health, making the assumption that it is the interior experience of the pastor. But Jesus didn't see it that way at all! Do we have the imagination to see beyond today's model and make good health an issue of the whole commuinity?

(4) The HMO model was OK in its idealistic and collectivist early days, but when it was financialized (when it started to have to pay fees-for-service for everything) its costs started to spiral out of control.

(5) The indemnity model was OK when it was "major medical." My grandparents paid their doctors and druggists, and made insurance claims in the case where they had huge costs. This promoted a real covenant relationship with their health-care professionals. It also allowed the professionals to see patients, not mess around with computerized paperwork all the time.

(6) People think health care is an inalienable right, so the covenant relationship between doctors/druggists and their patients, and the role of the congregation in caring for ailing members, is greatly weakened.

(7) Can you imagine what church would be like if we had the information-processing burden of the health-care industry? We'd need to install card-swipes on the communion rail! Can we help our society imagine a more trusting way of thinking about health than what we have now?

I think the ELCA denominational authorities are in a very interesting position; they have a unique opportunity to model a good way to get out of the current health-care mess. But instead they're saying that health-insurance rates are going to crush the church!

I wish I could offer more answers; I can't. But I hope the despair over the current system can open us to imagining a better way of doing things.

Da Vinci Code movie (possible spoiler)

I went to see the movie of the Da Vinci code.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382625/

There was some really cool stuff in it. How can you hate a movie showing good-looking people running around Paris (and around Europe) being chased by really spooky bad guys on a quest for the Holy Grail? To make it even better, they're trying to solve arcane puzzles involving Isaac Newton and the Gospels.

So, how can anyone hate this?

Oh, yeah, duh, there's a reason to convince yourself you hate this movie. It makes the allegation that Jesus of Nazareth didn't die on Golgotha, but rather went on to raise a family with the woman the Gospels know as Mary Magdalene. This, of course, is a difficult thing for Christian faith to accept -- if Jesus did not die, he did not, then, rise from the dead. Paul wrote (I Cor 15:41-45)

There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; indeed, star differs from star in glory. So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, "The first man, Adam, became a living being"; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.

Without his death, Jesus (whom Paul calls the "last Adam" here) couldn't be a life-giving spirit according to orthodox Christian faith.

But hold on. First of all, this is a movie, not the Gospel. Secondly, anything that depicts Mary Magdalene in some light other that the scurrilous accusation that she was a hooker is fine with me. Third, (spoiler), the person in the movie who turns out to be Jesus's descendant actually performs a healing miracle. This kind of stuff slides by quickly in the movie.

Are not all of us Christians part of Jesus's blood-line, at least spiritually and adoptively?

VIA AGP and ATI Radeon driver installation on Windows XP.

I had a hard time upgrading a Windows XP box;
I was upgrading to Windows XP SP2. The box has a VIA chipset and a Radeon AGP 8X model 9500 display adapter.

It upgraded fine, but the display driver wasn't installed.

When I went to install the ATI Radeon driver I got this idiot bother box from the ATI installer that said:

Setup was unable to complete the installation.
Try to setup your display adapter with a standard VGA driver before running setup.

I beat my head against this for a while, and finally figured out that I needed. The Windows XP SP2 disk had an old bad version of the VIA AGP driver (VIAAGP1.SYS).

So, I went to the web site viaarena.com, and downloaded the latest and greatest Hyperion driver kit, and installed the AGP driver, and rebooted.

Upon the reboot, the Windows box knew it had to have a display driver installed. The Find Driver wizard got stuck looking for the driver, so I just ran the ATI install, killed the Find Driver wizard, and rebooted.

Hopefully someone else who reads this can avoid the same hassles.

PCs slowing down with age.

I often get asked about Windows PCs that seem to slow down as they age. People sometimes tell me they have to wipe out the hard drive and reinstall Windows once in a while. Somehow the fairy tale has gotten started that Windows XP gets senile and has to be reborn once in a while. This is absolutely a fairy tale, and not true.

Reinstalling Windows is obviously a huge pain in the neck. It is not necessary either. What is happening in many cases is this: the page and/or registry files are getting fragmented. If your C drive has ever been over 90% full, this is very likely to be the case (especially if you installed software or ran some big piece of software while it was almost full).

When the PCs I care for start slowing down, here's what I do. All these steps are in aid of defragmenting the paging and registry files.

1. Download Mark Russinovich's fabulous little free program called PageDefrag from http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/PageDefrag.html. Follow the directions on his web site to install the program and figure out whether your page file (or the files containing your registry) are fragmented. If they are fragmented (that is, if they have more than one fragment each), keep going with this little procedure.
2. Open up Start > Settings > Control Panel / Add or Remove Programs. Go through the list of installed programs, and uninstall stuff you don't recognize or stuff you know you don't use any more.
3. Open up Start > Settings > Control Panel / Internet Options. Choose the General tab, then hit the Delete Files button. Check "Delete all offline content" then hit OK. This cleans out the Internet Explorer cache.
4. If you use some browser besides Internet Explorer, clear out its file cache as well. In Firefox, choose Tools > Options ... / Privacy / Cache, then hit the Clear Cache Now button.
5. Download the free Ad-Aware SE Personal and do a full scan. (http://www.lavasoftusa.com/)
6. Download and scan with the free Spybot Search and Destroy. (http://spybot.safer-networking.de/en/)
7. Empty the Recycle Bin (right click on it, choose Empty Recycle Bin).
8. Delete temp files. To do this, do Start / Run ... then type %temp% (with percent signs before and after), then hit OK. You'll get a list of temp files. Press Ctrl-A (select all) then hit shift - Delete (to delete the files without putting them in the Recycle bin). Occasionally the system will protest that some file is in use and refuse to delete it. In that case try again: Press Ctrl-A, then hold the control key and click on the file that can't be deleted (to deselect it), then hit shift -Delete. The purpose is to delete as many of these temporary files as you can. Don't worry about the ones you can't delete.
   
9. If you are using XP Pro, find out if you're using a lot of disk space for system restore points. (If you're using XP Home Edition, ignore this step.) Right click on My Computer and choose Properties. Look at the System Restore tab. It should say "Drive C (C:) Monitoring." Click on Drive C, then hit Settings... The maximum amount of disk space to use is most likely 12%. Unless you install and uninstall stuff a lot, you can reduce this to 9% or 6% without bad effect, and free up a bunch of disk space on the C drive.
10. Delete any other data files you don't need, or move them to another disk.
11. Defrag your C drive. Defrag it three times in a row. (XP's defrag does a little more each time).
12. Run PageDefrag again. Check the option to Defrag at Next Boot.
13. Restart your computer.

This should make a windows computer that is slowing down speed up again.

Craziness from the Democratic National Committee

I just got an email from the Democratic National Committee that reads like this:

"Bush Hits the Panic Button

"President Bush and the Republicans have gone into full-scale panic mode. They're already moving down in the polls, and with the selection of John Edwards as the next Vice President, John Kerry's campaign has been imbued with a fresh jolt of energy that spells doom for Bush's reelection hopes.

"George W. Bush himself has responded to Edwards joining the ticket by going to his home state of North Carolina to personally initiate the campaign of personal attacks against the next Vice President of the United States. That's the level they've already sunk to -- it took just one day after Edwards joined the ticket for Bush to go from zero to negative.

"But what else should we expect? Bush can't run on his record, and he's got no vision for the future. That's why he has done nothing but run a relentlessly negative campaign against John Kerry. And now he's got his sight on John Edwards.

The email goes on to solicit my financial support (which I will give).

But, if this note represents the actual thinking of the DNC, I am very worried. First of all, it's arrogant. Edwards may be a good campaigner, but, he is in fact less experienced than the folks running the Halliburton administration. Why should they be in "full scale panic mode" about him?

Second, it sounds like the DNC folks are underestimating their opponents again.

DNC, you're making a lot of mistakes!
--Kerry's still got all the charisma of a fence-post, even though he surely has all the media coaching money can buy. Why isn't he getting better at TV and sound-bites?

--Kerry reached out and grabbed the third rail of politics (abortion and morality). The sound bites made it sound like he was willing to compromise his personal principles to get elected. Why did he have to say this? If he did have to take on this issue why didn't he make his point more clearly?

--The Democratic Party is holding the convention in Boston. It's just navel-gazing narcissism to hold the convention in Boston. It should be someplace like Oklahoma City, Denver, Dallas, even Charlotte NC. Don't get me wrong, I like living in Mass. But, the way we do things here in Mass. is likely to make the rest of the USA think we're a little bit nutty. We have to win this election: why put the microscope on our eccentricities? Why not place the convention in a city where things will seem a little more main stream?

We have to win this one. Quit screwing up!