Archive For 2006

it’s only a matter of time.

(But, then, I should really just shut my bloody trap. Shouldn’t I.)

Welcome to Warriors for Christ Online

Our goal for this website is both to arouse in the hearts of Christians the need for Christ among the Native Americans, and to tell others about our ministry.”

Brings to mind this from Howard Zinn’s “Voices of a People’s History of the United States”:

“The Christians with their horses and swords and pikes began to carry out massacrers and strange cruelties against [the Native Americans]. They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in child bed; not only stabbing them and dismembering them, but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughterhouse. They made some low wide gallows on which the hanged victim’s feet almost touched the ground, stringing up their victims in lots of 13, “in memory of Our Redeemer and his Twelve Apostles,” then set burning wood at their feet and thus burned them alive.

The Chieftan, who had never heard any of this before, and was told he would go to Hell where, if he did not adopt the Christian faith, he would suffer eternal torment, asked the Franciscan friar if Christians all went to Heaven. When told that they did, he said he would prefer to go to Hell.”

If you can’t see this, you’re just not looking hard enough.

(Personally, I think the image is wacky enough on its own — a giant stigmatized hand coming out of the clouds with little finger puppet saints on it — without reading into it. Also, at this size/resolution, it looks like the little toddler Jesus is holding a bomb . . .)

More religiouis conspiracy theory fun at ClearAPath.com

I COULD NOT BE KIDDING YOU LESS.

(But, then, I should really just shut my bloody trap. Shouldn’t I.)

it’s blog, it’s blog…: crazy fucking FCC

“From an article entitled “Cell Phone FAQs”:

It’s the same thing in airplanes because they use computers to fly through the air. If the computers don’t work properly, the airplane may not go the right direction or fly at the right height, or they may even crash! Next time you get on a plane, make sure that turn off your mobile phone so that everyone can have a safe flight.”

Was just outside, having a smoke. A nice day. Extremely quiet — no one on the street.

And then I hear “what are ya fuckin gay guys in there, ya live together so well. Fuckin assholes.” And it’s coming from across the street — from the mailman, as he makes his rounds.

Must have had an altercation with a resident, I think to myself.

He’s on his way to the next house, and I hear “fuckin (incomprehensible) asshole stupid (incomprehensible) fuckin fucks . . .” . . .

Next house: “(loud but incomprehensible).” Then a lucid “SON of a bitch.”

And he continues on, swearing a blue streak. He is doing is now, no doubt, as I type this.

Made my day.

(But, then, I should really just shut my bloody trap. Shouldn’t I.)

“‘The scriptures are crystal clear that when God sets out to punish a nation, it is with the sword. An IED is just a broken-up sword,’ Phelps-Roper said. ‘Since that is [God’s] weapon of choice, our forum of choice has got to be a dead soldier’s funeral.'”

Ah, good ol’ Fred Phelps is still at it . . .

CNN.com – Bikers roll to military funerals to oppose anti-gay protests – Feb 21, 2006:

EXACTLY!

in case you don’t want to follow the link, here’s the story from SLATE:

The Cut-and-Paste State of the Union
On foreign affairs, the speech was full of anachronisms and meaningless spin.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2006, at 3:11 PM ET

George W. Bush’s State of the Union address Tuesday night may have been the oddest speech of his presidency, and that’s saying a lot. At times he seemed locked in a time warp, as if momentous events of the past few weeks had never taken place. At other times he seemed adrift on some separate astral plane, describing a political landscape that simply doesn’t exist in the world the rest of us inhabit.

In foreign affairs, which took up the first half of the address, Bush needed to deal with two big questions: What’s our next move in Iraq, and how does Hamas’ victory in the Palestinian elections affect the prospects for democracy—or, more to the point, Bush’s policy of spreading democracy—across the Middle East and the world?

On Iraq, remarkably, the president said nothing remotely new. He filled in that section of the speech with a cut-and-paste of passages from earlier speeches. The intent, no doubt, was to exude confidence in the present course: Everything’s fine (“we are in this fight to win, and we are winning”), so why do anything differently?

But, as often happens when you regurgitate stock phrases, anachronisms intruded. For instance: “We’re helping Iraq build an inclusive government.” Really? It looks like the Iraqis are pretty much in charge now. We may be trying to persuade the Shiites to bring in more Sunnis in order to marginalize the insurgency, but our leverage is slim, and all signs suggest that the Shiites, who won the election overwhelmingly, will do pretty much as they please.

Another passage along these lines: “We’re continuing reconstruction efforts and helping the Iraqi government to fight corruption and build a modern economy, so all Iraqis can experience the benefits of freedom.” Well, that was the goal—a worthy goal—but apparently we’re no longer pursuing it, unless you define “reconstruction efforts” in the most minimal, finger-lifting fashion. In the coming year’s budget, Bush is requesting no additional money for Iraqi reconstruction, even though more than one-third of the $18 billion already allocated for that purpose remains unspent, got lost in the cracks of corruption and waste, or had to be diverted to security. An official U.S. audit, issued last week, concludes that, among other shortfalls, over half of water-sanitation projects and a third of electrical plants will be left unfinished. The Iraqis lack the management or resources to pick up the slack themselves.

Instead of openly confronting these unpleasant realities, as he will have to do at some point soon, Bush tried to reframe the debate, warning several times that we cannot “surrender to evil” or “retreat from our duties” or embrace “the false comfort of isolationism.” To which one can only respond: What? Who, in any mainstream party or movement or school of thought in this country, is proposing anything remotely like isolationism? Clearly Bush was implying (though never stating explicitly, keeping the charge deniable) that the Democrats want to go this route, that withdrawing from Iraq is the same as withdrawing from the world.

This is a standard Rovian ploy: presenting the world in the starkest terms—good vs. evil, responsible engagement vs. irresponsible complacency—with Bush spearheading the former and his opponents (by dint of the fact that they are opponents) aligned with the latter. Does Bush believe this vision? Or is he just spinning in an attempt to reverse his tumbling ratings? And which theory is more disconcerting?

Reality-spinning can go only so far, though. It can’t disguise or refigure the year’s most jolting political earthquake: the victory of Hamas—the militant Islamic party that openly advocates terror and the destruction of Israel—in the Palestinian parliamentary elections. Bush didn’t ignore this event entirely—he declared, to stormy applause, that Hamas must recognize Israel and disarm—but he did sidestep its staggering implications. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had pushed for these elections, against the advice not only of Israelis but of the relatively moderate Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. Their push was in keeping with Bush’s flowery rhetoric, ever since his second term began, about the unstoppable force of freedom and democracy. Elections in Palestine, he explained, were crucial; they would ignite a flame that could spread across the Middle East. Well, yes, they might just do that—but it’s not the sort of firestorm that Bush and Rice had in mind.

The president said, as a veiled response to this outcome, “Elections are vital, but they are only the beginning.” This formulation of the problem ignores one basic critique of Bush’s exuberant rhetoric: that, in many societies long under authoritarian rule, elections shouldn’t be “the beginning”; they should come more toward the middle of an evolution toward democracy. As Bush himself said in the speech, “Raising up a democracy requires the rule of law and protection of minorities and strong, accountable institutions that last longer than a single vote.” Elections alone can’t create these institutions; where religious fundamentalists represent the only organized alternative to a corrupt authority, elections can move a country in the opposite direction.

It’s too early by far to gauge the long-term effects of Hamas’ coming to power. By any measure, though, Bush’s view of the world—that freedom is on the march, liberty is a universal desire, and democracy an unambiguous force for peace and security—took a huge hammering from this election. Yet there he stood at the podium last night, contented and confident, as if his imploded north star were still sparkling in the sky.

Fred Kaplan writes the “War Stories” column for Slate. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.

(But, then, I should really just shut my bloody trap. Shouldn’t I.)