April, 2010 archive
“Oh, Baby, You Rocked My World” (Updated) 2
This has gotten mostly derisive play in the West, but think about it:
Change the phrase “Islamic cleric” to “Christian evangelist.”
It is really no crazier nor more hate-full than the stuff many of our home-grown religious fanatics say (think Pat Robertson on Haiti or James Dobson on anything).
Promiscuous women are responsible for earthquakes, a senior Iranian cleric has said.
Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi told worshippers in Tehran last Friday that they had to stick to strict codes of modesty to protect themselves.
“Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray and spread adultery in society which increases earthquakes,” he said.
Addendum, the Next Morning:
A commenter at Balloon Juice links to BlagHag, who’s fomenting a protest:
Registering Disapproval 0
Glomarization takes down the practice of registering kids’ birthday wishes at stores. Read her post, then follow the link to the article which prompted it.
There really is only one reason for merchants to promote this: It’s to get you to come to their store, not go to the one down the street. Like much American marketing, it is a slimy, manipulative practice masquerading as a service.
Greater Wingnuttery XLVI 0
But what if I don’t have a chicken?
Aside: The time in which we can pack over the ridge into the next valley, establish a homestead, dig a privy, and feed ourselves off the land while making our own buckskin clothes is long gone.
Furrfu.
What Brendan Said 0
“Oh, Mann.”
The Entitlement Society 0
Stockholders and management are never responsible. It’s called fiduciary responsibility. Or something.
“My Way or the Highway, Patrol” 0
The Regent expects obedience. Hence, the Virginia State police supported raising the maximum speed limit and remained silent on gun control issues.
They were doing as they were told:
Administration officials made it clear to the state police that it was expected to back the speed limit change, which McDonnell supported, and remain silent on some gun measures, the source said. The state police offered testimony on at least one gun proposal this year – defeated legislation to require criminal background checks on certain private gun sales – before being hushed on others, the source added.
Food Fright 0
There’s got to be more to this:
A study by the group Mission: Readiness finds that school lunches are making American kids so fat that fewer of them can meet the military’s physical fitness standards. That, in turn, is putting recruitment in jeopardy.
The threat posed by school lunches must be minor compared to those horrible things called “breakfast sandwiches,” double-stuff pizzas, chips, and Double-Downs. I figured there was something missing in the news story.
Here’s an excerpt from the report’s executive summary. The report focuses on school lunches because they are controllable, not because they are the culprit, except to the extent they include Double-Downs (emphasis added):
If we don’t take steps now to build a strong, healthy foundation for our young people, then it won’t just be our military that pays the price – our nation as a whole will suffer also.
The report itself is here (PDF).
At Bay on Ebay 0
Doing his (own) bidding:
North Yorkshire Trading Standards said those who bid on their own items, or who get friends and family to do it for them, are breaking the law.
Voting Is neither a Right, nor a Privilege. It Is a Duty. 0
Turn your back, get stabbed in it.
A good citizen votes because he or she must, not because he or she wants to.
Embed from TPM via Not Larry Sabato.
Unreconstructed Revisionists 2
The Philadelphia Inquirer discusses the Regent’s Confederate History Month Proclamation, the Texas School Book Massacre, and other such malefactions. The excerpt below suffers much snippage; follow the link to read the whole thing–it’s worth two minutes of your time.
Only after the Sons group said it wouldn’t mind slavery being mentioned in the proclamation did McDonnell rewrite it . . . .
But not all attempts like McDonnell’s to rewrite history are thwarted. Concerned about what it perceived to be a liberal bias in textbooks, the Texas Board of Education has ordered up a different version of events from book manufacturers. . . .
And what will the books say? Well, a tip of the hat to the conservative political movement will include Phyllis Schlafly and the Heritage Foundation. A focus on the Confederacy will include side-by-side comparisons of speeches by Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln, as if they were equals.
That will surely make the Sons of Confederate Veterans proud. Revisionist history is what they’re all about, but someone has to stand up for the truth.
The Entitlement Society 0
Paul Krugman in the Guardian makes the case for financial consumer protection. Short version: “You can’t trust the banksters”:
(snip)
The main moral you should draw from the financial crisis, though, doesn’t involve the fine print of reform; it involves the urgent need to change Wall Street. Listening to financial-industry lobbyists and the Republican politicians who have been huddling with them, you’d think that everything will be fine as long as the federal government promises not to do any more bailouts. But that’s totally wrong – and not just because no such promise would be credible.
The fact is that, however the Goldman Sachs case is resolved, much of the financial industry has become a racket – a game in which a handful of people are lavishly paid to mislead and exploit consumers and investors. And if we don’t lower the boom on these practices, the racket will just go on
The Booman, in a separate post on the same general topic, dissects yet another Republican misdirection play:
How soon these Republicans and their conservative disinformation machine want you to forget The Resolution Trust Company created up by Bush Sr. in 1989 to resolve the S & L crisis.
More recently, how quickly they want you to forget Hank Paulson and George Bush and the complete lack of oversight over TARP program that those GOP stalwarts created to bail out the banks that were “too big to fail.”
How quickly they want you to forget Paulson’s behind closed doors threats to Congress that if they didn’t pass the TARP legislation in precisely the manner the Bush administration demanded “that within 24 hours, the entire political structure of the United States would collapse.”
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Add to the list another fantastic lie:
“I’m a Republican. I care about the little guy.”
Gunnuttery on Parade 2
What Brendan said.
A Nation of Christians Is Not a Christian Nation 0
It has been a long time since I read the Richmond Times-Dispatch (in my younger days known as the “Trash Disgrace” for its solid adherence to the “Lost Cause” and segregation) with any regularity, but, in responding to the Regent’s declaration last month of Christian Heritage Week, they got one right:
The faith of the Founders eludes definition according to the standards of our day. Jefferson indeed would not qualify as an orthodox Christian, or perhaps even as a heterodox one. His version of the Bible omits the very things that make the New Testament a declaration of Christianity. Jefferson’s architectural masterpieces — the Rotunda, Monticello, and the Virginia Capitol — manifest soul craft. They resemble neither cathedrals nor kirks but classical edifices redolent of Greece and Rome. Franklin, too, is hard to classify. Church attendance is not an accurate gauge of devotion; Franklin’s participation alternated between steady and sporadic. He harbored persistent doubts of Christ’s divinity, however. He is not to be mistaken for Mike Huckabee.
(snip)
The Founders drew their ideals and their practical solutions from numerous sources. Christianity inhabited the minds of many. Inspiration also came from the ancient world, as well as from philosophers associated with the Enlightenment.
Christianity’s role in American politics and culture cannot be denied. Nevertheless, Christian Heritage Week and similar assertions seldom serve as examples of historical scholarship or, for that matter, of creedal exactitude. Religion in general and Christianity in particular are diminished by attempts to conform the Founders to our world.
The Founders were certainly influenced by the philosophy of thinkers within the context of a Christian Europe. It was the world they knew.
So too were they influenced by Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Aristotle, and others who were in no way Christian, though they were in the great stream of European philosophical and legal thought (which has also helped shaped Christianity).
Most of the Founders–with the possible occasional exception of Jefferson–cannot be considered philosophers in any sense. They were practical men concerned with what works, not with internally coherent theories to explain causality, being, and knowledge.
But in no way did the Founders wish to establish a theocracy; those who today claim that they did are at best deluded, at worst liars.
And I don’t buy the “at best” alternative.
QOTD 0
Clarence Darrow, from the Quotemaster:
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
The Entitlement Society 0
Knock down, drag out.
“Empty boxes.” Heh. Sounds like “boxes of air” to me.
See the comments at Rising Hegemon.
Via Eschaton, which wonders when a US television network would air a discussion like this one.
Twits on Twitter 0
The Boston Globe offers a “How To Twit.”
The Wolf’s Wardrobe 0
Where is the sheep’s clothing kept?
In the sacks of Goldman.
Bloomberg (emphasis added):
Follow the link to see the shell game explained.
As I’ve been saying, Wall Street called them bags of gold, but they were bags of air.
All label, no gold.
