The Limited Modified Hangout

Towing the lion since June 2003.

Tuesday, September 30, 2003

Capricorn: (Dec. 22—Jan. 19)
Stretching before exercise does not require a medieval rack and the services of two shirtless, hooded men, but that couldn't hurt.

Holy Sex
How it ravishes our souls.
by Philip Yancey | posted 09/30/2003

A PHYSICIAN FRIEND OF MINE spent two months in a remote part of the African nation Benin. The airplane on which he traveled home was showing current movies, and after two months away from all media, he found them jarring. Each movie centered on sexual intercourse, as though this were the only significant topic in the world, whereas David had just been dealing with weighty matters—disease, poverty, hunger, religion, death—while relating to colleagues in a way that had nothing to do with sexual intercourse. When the plane stopped for refueling at the Brussels airport, David saw rows of magazines for sale featuring women's breasts in various stages of exposure. That, too, seemed odd, for he had been working in an area where women commonly uncovered their breasts in public, not for sexual arousal but to feed their children. Welcome back to Western civilization, he thought to himself.

I know no clearer example of the modern, reductionistic approach to life than human sexuality. We survey people about their private sex lives, and write manuals based on data gained by watching people perform sex in a laboratory setting. To junior high students we teach details of sexuality forbidden to previous generations.

At the same time, I know of no greater failure among Christians than in presenting a persuasive approach to sexuality. Outside the church, people think of God as the great spoilsport of human sexuality, not its inventor. The pope utters pronouncements, denominations issue position papers, and many Christians ignore them and follow the lead of the rest of society. Surveys reveal little difference between church attenders and non-attenders in the rates of premarital intercourse and cohabitation. Surveys also show that many people have left their churches in disgust over hypocrisy about sex, especially when ministers fail to practice what they preach....

Sour Grapes
Why is there no such thing as a good, low-priced California wine?
By Mike Steinberger
Posted Friday, September 26, 2003, at 8:17 AM PT

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of people in the world today: those running for governor of California, and those shaking their heads in disbelief at California. I'm one of the latter, but not for the reason you might think. Forget Arnold and Arianna, the real farce is what's become of California wines. How does a place so conducive to cultivating wine grapes produce so much cheap swill and overpriced mediocrity? Why is the good stuff—what there is of it—so egregiously expensive? And why has California given rise to such an obnoxious wine culture? If Californians want to recall something, they might start with all those insipid chardonnays....

Spirit World: Lost: parrot who preaches evangelical Christian message
A fire-and-brimstone preaching parrot is on the lam and his Alberta owner is praying for the bird's return.

Dale Doell's prized African gray parrot, Solomon, has a 2,600-word vocabulary with an evangelical Christian message.

"He preaches a full-scale sermon out of the Word of God, just like John the Baptist," said Doell, who is a born-again Christian. ...

Monday, September 29, 2003

Wretched Urgency
The Grace of God or Hamsters on a Wheel?
by Michael Spencer

...I've been thinking these things for years, and they aren't shadows. What I am going to to say is real, and I am going to bet that once I let the cat out of the bag, a lot of readers will write me and say they thought it too, but were afraid to say anything because they didn't want to get in trouble or get preached at. So here we go.

I don't think Christianity is about converting people....

...This all started for me when I noticed that there was no concern for church growth in any of the letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2-3. Read it. Stop right now and go read it.

OK. Am I telling the truth? It says to hold fast. It encourages purity, fidelity, bravery and love. There are commendations and criticisms. But nothing about church growth. Nothing that says the agenda of Jesus for these churches was militant evangelism. I'm not saying there isn't anything in these letters about evangelism. I am NOT trying to substantiate some kind of hyper-Calvinistic anti-missions philosophy. Far from it. I'm simply saying that in these two very important chapters summarizing the message of Jesus to these seven key churches in Asia Minor, there is no wretched urgency about evangelism and witnessing.

There is urgency about holiness, truth, and responsiveness to Christ. There is urgency about the Gospel IN the church, and among those who say they believe it. There is commendation for faithfulness in living it out. There just isn't anything about church growth or aggressive personal evangelism. If you find it, you're making it up.

How about the epistles in the New Testament? In those places where Christians are addressed as Christians, where is the urgency about church growth or personal evangelism?

Yes, I know that Paul is urgent about his ministry, but I don't find his instructions for other Christians to be entirely in the same vein. I hear Christians being told to live quiet, peaceful, honest, generous lives adorned with integrity and love. Christians are told to be devoted to their families, to love fellow believers, and to live in such a way that outsiders cannot accuse or criticize. If they suffer for being a Christian, it should not be because they provoked a response through simply living the life Jesus taught.

Again and again, I look in the epistles for the kind of Christian experience that I was taught was normal, and I do not find it. The statements of urgency are not statements telling me to turn my house and life upside down in frenetic efforts to persuade people to join my religion. The urgency in Paul comes from his personal mission and his own vocation as a church planter. I can't automatically apply it all to everyone else.

...I do not find guilt-inducing, blood on your hands urgency in Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians or Thessalonians, letters that are indicative of diverse pastoral situations and relationships. Each letter is consumed almost entirely with concerns and problems within the church. The "witness" Paul is working to shape is lives submitted to Christ in matters of doctrine and discipleship. He is not organizing confrontive door-knocking expeditions....

...The Thessalonians, who had caught a bad case of "Left Behind Fever," received this admonition: "1 Thessalonians 4:10-12 But we urge you, brothers, to do this more and more, 11 and to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, 12 so that you may live properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one. In fact, it is remarkable how often the advice to the Thessalonians could be paraphrases as "Calm down. Live sensibly and morally. Stand firm. Be the sort of people who have an anchor for the soul in times when anything goes."...

FBI bypasses First Amendment to nail a hacker
By Mark Rasch, SecurityFocus
Posted: 29/09/2003 at 16:35 GMT

Citing a provision of the Patriot Act, the FBI is sending letters to journalists telling them to secretly prepare to turn over their notes, e-mails and sources to the bureau. Should we throw out the First Amendment to nail a hacker, writes SecurityFocus columnist Mark Rasch.

Frequent readers of this space know that I am no apologist for hackers like Adrian Lamo, who, in the guise of protection, access others' computer systems without authorization, and then publicize these vulnerabilities.

When Lamo did this to the New York Times, he violated two of my cardinal rules: Don't make enemies with people appointed for life by the President of the United States; and don't make enemies of people who buy their ink by the gallon.

Now, in the scope of prosecuting Lamo, the FBI is doing the hacker one better by violating both of these precepts in one fell swoop.

The Bureau recently sent letters to a handful of reporters who have written stories about the Lamo case -- whether or not they have actually interviewed Lamo. The letters warn them to expect subpoenas for all documents relating to the hacker, including, apparently, their own notes, e-mails, impressions, interviews with third parties, independent investigations, privileged conversations and communications, off the record statements, and expense and travel reports related to stories about Lamo.

In short, everything.

The notices make no mention of the protections of the First Amendment, Department of Justice regulations that restrict the authority to subpoena information from journalists, or the New York law that creates a "newsman's shield" against disclosure of certain confidential information by reporters.

Instead, the FBI has threatened to put these reporters in jail unless they agree to preserve all of these records while they obtain a subpoena for them under provisions amended by the USA-PATRIOT Act.

The government also officiously informed the reporters that this is an "official criminal investigation" and asks that they not disclose the request to preserve documents, or the contents of the letter, to anyone -- presumably including their editors, directors, or lawyers -- under the implied threat of prosecution for obstruction of justice.

That's why you're reading about the letters for the first time here.

They do this despite the fact that, had they actually obtained and issued a subpoena for these documents, the federal criminal procedure rules would have prohibited the imposition of any obligation of secrecy unless the Justice Department obtained a "gag" order on the press -- a rare event indeed.

All of this began the day after the Attorney General advised all United States Attorney's Offices to prosecute each and every criminal offense with the harshest possible penalties, instead of the previous policy of prosecuting cases with the penalties that most accurately reflect the seriousness of the offense. Thus, journalists be forewarned -- your government may be seeking to throw the book at you!

Believe it or not, this isn't even the worst of it....

Joshua Harris kisses masterbation goodbye, so to speak
The secret is to marry a cute blond girl in your early 20s. I'll forgo the Craftmatic Adjustable Bed joke.

God on Their Side
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

APUTO, Mozambique

Mention the words "evangelical missionary," and many Americans conjure up an image of redneck zealots' forcing starving children to be baptized before they get a few crusts of bread.

In reality, the wave of activity abroad by U.S. evangelicals is one of the most important — and welcome — trends in our foreign relations. I disagree strongly with most evangelical Christians, theologically and politically. But I tip my hat to them abroad.

...But I'm convinced that we should all celebrate the big evangelical push into Africa because the bottom line is that it will mean more orphanages, more schools and, above all, more clinics and hospitals. Particularly when AIDS is ravaging Africa, those church hospitals are lifesavers.

"In most of Africa, these are the cornerstone of the health system," said Helene Gayle, who directs AIDS work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "In some countries, they serve more people than the government health system."

The evangelicals abroad are mostly pragmatists, not ideologues, so they should be a good influence on the Christian Right. While fundamentalists in America blindly oppose condom distribution, evangelicals in Africa see their friends dying of AIDS. They thunder against sexual immorality — but often hand out condoms....

...Yet while it sounds strange to say so, evangelicals may be Africa's most important feminist influence today. And how can one not welcome their growing presence as Ms. Angeline tells of her rescue and cradles a lovely baby girl — not surprisingly, named Katrin.

Southern Baptists Report Donations Drop
The nation's largest Protestant denomination has been beset with internal strife for 20 years.
By the Associated Press
September 26, 2003

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP)--The Southern Baptist Convention could face a financial crisis within a few years unless churchgoers start giving more money to the denomination, according to an internal report.

Giving by Southern Baptist church members decreased steadily from 1968 to 1998 as a percentage of their earnings, down to 2.03 percent, according to the Champaign, Ill.-based Christian research group empty tomb inc., which provided some of the statistics used in the report....

...However, he said that ``some of our Southern Baptist leaders, particularly in mega-churches, have developed a relationship to denominational giving that is unhealthy for them and the denomination. ... It is absolutely crucial those pastors not fail in their responsibility as leaders.''...

Private space race nears its climax
Scaled Composites, Armadillo are favorites to win $10 million prize in the next 9 to 12 months

The X Prize trophy - and $10 million - will go to the first team to send a privately developed, piloted craft to the edge of space, then do it again in two weeks' time....

Iraqi Family Ties Complicate American Efforts for Change

LEMIYA, Iraq, Sept. 27 — Iqbal Muhammad does not recall her first glimpse of her future husband, because they were both newborns at the time, but she remembers precisely when she knew he was the one. It was the afternoon her uncle walked over from his house next door and proposed that she marry his son Muhammad.

"I was a little surprised, but I knew right away it was a wise choice," she said, recalling that afternoon nine years ago, when she and Muhammad were 22. "It is safer to marry a cousin than a stranger."

Her reaction was typical in a country where nearly half of marriages are between first or second cousins, a statistic that is one of the more important and least understood differences between Iraq and America. The extraordinarily strong family bonds complicate virtually everything Americans are trying to do here, from finding Saddam Hussein to changing women's status to creating a liberal democracy.

"Americans just don't understand what a different world Iraq is because of these highly unusual cousin marriages," said Robin Fox of Rutgers University, the author of "Kinship and Marriage," a widely used anthropology textbook. "Liberal democracy is based on the Western idea of autonomous individuals committed to a public good, but that's not how members of these tight and bounded kin groups see the world. Their world is divided into two groups: kin and strangers."...

...That dichotomy remains today, said Ihsan M. al-Hassan, a sociologist at the University of Baghdad. At the local level, the clan traditions provide more support and stability than Western institutions, he said, noting that the divorce rate among married cousins is only 2 percent in Iraq, versus 30 percent for other Iraqi couples. But the local ties create national complications.

"The traditional Iraqis who marry their cousins are very suspicious of outsiders," Dr. Hassan said. "In a modern state a citizen's allegiance is to the state, but theirs is to their clan and their tribe. If one person in your clan does something wrong, you favor him anyway, and you expect others to treat their relatives the same way."

The more educated and urbanized Iraqis have become, Dr. Hassan said, the more they are likely to marry outsiders and adopt Western values. But the clan traditions have hardly disappeared in the cities, as is evident by the just-married cousins who parade Thursday evenings into the Babylon Hotel in Baghdad. Surveys in Baghdad and other Arab cities in the past two decades have found that close to half of marriages are between first or second cousins.

The prevalence of cousin marriage did not get much attention before the war from Republicans in the United States who expected a quick, orderly transition to democracy in Iraq. But one writer who investigated the practice warned fellow conservatives to stop expecting postwar Iraq to resemble postwar Germany or Japan...

Bush Aides Say They'll Cooperate With Probe Into Intelligence Leak

By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 29, 2003; Page A01

President Bush's aides promised yesterday to cooperate with a Justice Department inquiry into an administration leak that exposed the identity of a CIA operative, but Democrats charged that the administration cannot credibly investigate itself and called for an independent probe.

White House officials said they would turn over phone logs if the Justice Department asked them to. But the aides said Bush has no plans to ask his staff members whether they played a role in revealing the name of an undercover officer who is married to former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, one of the most visible critics of Bush's handling of intelligence about Iraq.

An administration official told The Washington Post on Saturday that two White House officials leaked the information to selected journalists to discredit Wilson. The leak could constitute a federal crime, and intelligence officials said it might have endangered confidential sources who had aided the operative throughout her career. CIA Director George J. Tenet has asked the Justice Department to investigate how the leak occurred....

QUOTE OF THE DAY
I think the level of casualties is secondary. I mean, it may sound like an odd thing to say, but all the great scholars who have studied American character have come to the conclusion that we are a warlike people and that we love war. . . . What we hate is not casualties but losing. And if the war goes well and if the American public has the conviction that we're being well-led and that our people are fighting well and that we're winning, I don't think casualties are going to be the issue.
-- Michael Ledeen, AEI Breakfast, March 27, 2003

How public education cripples our kids, and why
By John Taylor Gatto

...There you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that "efficiency" is the paramount virtue, rather than love, lib, erty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed....

...First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

[THE CHRISTIAN GHETTO]

...Within the Church currently there is a strange effort to counteract this effect by bringing our pseudo-spiritual subculture around with us everywhere we go. We turn the world into a large church service full of people who believe like we do and who don’t offend our sensibilities with their sinful behaviors. Opening a phone book, I can find Christian pharmacies, Christian art framing, Christian bakeries and here in my hometown someone has created a business concept out of a cheesy Christian T-shirt. The Lord’s Gym Health And Fitness Centers are dedicated to promoting “Fitness for Body & Soul” and offer classes such as Praise Dance, Body of Armor and Chariots of Fire Spin. Now, some might argue such businesses are a good model of stretching the barriers of our spiritual activity beyond Sunday morning. However, all they are doing is adding spiritual language into things that are naturally spiritual because they are part of the human experience God has created. Taking care of your body is spiritual even if you don’t play the Newsboys while working on your biceps. These “Christian” shops are doing what all the “secular” shops are doing, but to the exclusion of non-believers. Creating places like this completely removes God’s disciples from the world, which doesn’t bode well for the world, and I daresay, ends up hurting the Church as well.

What’s occurring is the creation of a ghetto. The word has long since been associated with inner city housing projects and Elvis’s worst song ever, but the ghettos have been around since the middle ages. Then they were walled sections of a city that a religious group (usually Jews) was forced to occupy as a way of keeping them from the rest of the population. Christians appear to be doing it to themselves. And within the walls of this Christian ghetto we’re not only experiencing death in the Church but in the arts as well. Go to a Christian bookstore. As you walk the aisles you’ll see shelf after shelf of Christians toys (usually of poor quality), Christians music (usually a little worse than the toys) and over on the right side, by the Christian coffee shop called “Jesus Java” you’ll see a shelf labeled “Art.” This shelf consists of a Thomas Kinkade painting, and two photo landscapes all with Bible verses or Oswald Chambers quotations emblazoned across the top right corner. Here we are, the group of people that claims to have the corner market on understanding the First and Greatest Artist and we can’t even imitate His creative nature as effectively as a world that doesn’t know Him.

[THE LAZY CHRISTIAN’S GUIDE TO PRUDENCE]

Again, the problem is categories. We have categorized ourselves out of the world. Life is one category. Good music, good art, good health and good prescription drugs are innately spiritual if they are in fact good. We don’t need to label something Christian to the exclusion of the rest of the world for it to be good and pure. Because all things that are good and pure are of God, whether the name on it is Rich Mullins or David Gray. All truth is God’s truth. If we are seeking God out in everything we do He will inevitably show up. He doesn’t need labels or categories to find us and we shouldn’t need them to find Him. Sure, there are experiences you should stay away from, but He has given us a mind, a body of believers and the Holy Spirit to help us decipher what is of Him and what is not. Our categories have become the lazy Christian’s guide to prudence. “I don’t have to worry about what messages are in this movie, it’s Christian.” Not only is that argument a dangerous fallacy, but it also leads to the exclusion of truth God is revealing to us through “non-Christian” sources. In God’s cosmic video store there is one category: Truth. It’s not supposed to be easy. Every experience, every person you meet and every choice you make is a part of the walk. It takes a lot more work and thinking on our part, but we must at least read the back of every video before determining its worth. The good news is there are no late fees. You don’t have to have all the answers. We’ll have the answers someday, but for now look for God everywhere. And yes, He might even be found in that stupid Elvis song.

Leaked report rejects Iraqi al-Qaeda link

There are no current links between the Iraqi regime and the al-Qaeda network, according to an official British intelligence report seen by BBC News.

The classified document, written by defence intelligence staff three weeks ago, says there has been contact between the two in the past.

But it assessed that any fledgling relationship foundered due to mistrust and incompatible ideologies....

...The defence intelligence staff document, seen by BBC defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan, is classified Top Secret and was sent to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and other senior members of the government.

It says al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden views Iraq's ruling Ba'ath party as running contrary to his religion, calling it an "apostate regime".

"His aims are in ideological conflict with present day Iraq," it says.

Gilligan says that in recent days intelligence sources have told the BBC there is growing disquiet at the way their work is being politicised to support the case for war on Iraq....

In GOP, Concern Over Iraq Price Tag
Some Doubt Need For $20.3 Billion For Rebuilding

By Jonathan Weisman and Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, September 26, 2003; Page A01

A new curriculum for training an Iraqi army for $164 million. Five hundred experts, at $200,000 each, to investigate crimes against humanity. A witness protection program for $200,000 per Iraqi participant. A computer study for the Iraqi postal service: $54 million....

...$100 million to build seven planned communities with a total of 3,258 houses, plus roads, an elementary school, two high schools, a clinic, a place of worship and a market for each; $10 million to finance 100 prison-building experts for six months, at $100,000 an expert; 40 garbage trucks at $50,000 each; $900 million to import petroleum products such as kerosene and diesel to a country with the world's second-largest oil reserves; and $20 million for a four-week business course, at $10,000 per student....

..."We're not talking sanity here," Dyer said. "The world's second-largest oil country is importing oil, and a country full of concrete is importing concrete." ...

...Some Republican aides say the numbers may be more defensible than they sound because the budget is not quite real. They suggest the administration has inflated costs, in part to avoid having to come back next year for a new emergency spending bill, and in part so they can skim some of the money for classified military efforts....

MAGGIE'S MAULING FOR BLAIR
By Chris Mclaughlin

MARGARET Thatcher has savagely undermined Tony Blair's case for war against Iraq.

In her first reported comment on the conflict, the Tory leader who took Britain to victory in the 1982 Falkland Conflict, has told friends that the war against Iraq was a "mistake"....

Sunday, September 28, 2003

In Praise Of The Shattered Society

...The illusion which we called 'society' is coming to an end. I'd say the inevitability factor here is so high that we might as well admit it has ended already, and get on with the new twenty cents...er...paradigm. What is coming now, what is effectively here already, is the next phase in human societal evolution -- beyond family, beyond tribe, beyond nation -- we are forming societies based on common interest, communities based not on where we live but on who we are. These societies have their own customs, their own rules, their own ambassadors to other such societies. These are not societies formed to fight the sabretooth tiger or pave the streets. These are societies formed to fulfill the actual needs of the individuals who compose them. In these societies, the needs of the individual and the good of society are one, because the society exists solely as a consensual entity. You aren't born into these societies, you join them.

Why does this scare the sort of people who write for Atlantic and have letters printed in the New York Times? Because it means the end of their power. It means the end of artificial consensus, it means the end of leaders who set the pace and followers who follow. It means the end of the sanctioning of art, literature, or opinion as 'mainstream' or 'fringe'. It means that everyone is creator and critic, where every individual decides whose opinions matter to him and whose do not. The movie critic is replaced by the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup, and ten thousand threads in a hundred thousand forums replace the editorial pages. When it is as easy to reach one page on the Web as it is to reach another, when every opinion is an equal click away, then there is no creation of 'proper' and 'improper' opinions. It will no longer be the case that the 'mainstream' opinions get slick coverage in TIME and the 'fringe' gets mimeographed handouts. There will be no way to zone ideas where they will not be seen by the rank-and-file, no way to proclaim the 'correct' range of opinions.

No more consensus. And with it, no more of the sick joke we call Democracy. How much longer can the government continue to claim legitimacy when it represents an ever dwindling percentage of the population? How can the government even function, when decisions cannot be reduced to a binary 'yes/no', but instead must account for a thousand variations of opinion? Even the 'mass' media is no longer so massive....from three networks to a hundred cable channels, to a million Webcasts. What would once have been isolated incidents or local outrages become national, even international, outcries. The Church of Scientology is fighting a hydra distributing its 'secret' documents, and it is draining itself in lawsuits faster than it can drain its foes. Cybersitters' fascism, which would once have been unrevealed for fear of losing an advertiser, is now front-page news -- because the net never lets a story die. There is no sweeping a scandal, real or imagined, under the rug, because there will always be someone with a gripe and a modem to keep it alive.

...Nations and tribes need leaders. Individuals in full control of their own environment do not. This is what scares the powers-that-won't-be-for-much-longer. This is why they decry the 'breakdown' of society -- when what is happening is the creation of the only society that has any moral right to exist, the consensual society of mind. They are Neanderthals, listening to their Cro-Magnon children talk, and realizing that the world has passed them by. They'll fight back as Neanderthals do -- with clubs and fire and hoarse, inarticulate imitation of the language of their evolved progeny. And then they'll die, destroyed by those they fathered. ...

Friday, September 26, 2003

Stink Of Hypocrisy
Saddam is seemingly not the only advocate of weapons of mass destruction. Winston Churchill was on the verge of 'drenching' Germany with poison gas before the war turned in Britain's favour, reveals George Rosie

EVER since Hans Blix and his team of UN inspectors began rummaging for Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction' our own political leaders have been sounding pious notes from the moral high ground. We're constantly told that Saddam's 'rogue state' is a menace to mankind. Which may be true, but Tony Blair and Jack Straw might be advised to be a little less indignant. Most countries have traces of chemicals on their hands. Britain certainly has. Buried in the Public Record Office in London are a series of documents that reveal how we, the British, continued to develop and stockpile chemical weapons in secret long after signing a treaty in 1925 forbidding their use.

Towards the end of the second world war, when the threat of a German invasion was over and the war was being won, Winston Churchill was planning a chemical holocaust. He wanted to 'drench' the cities of Germany with poison gas so that 'most of the population would be requiring constant medical attention'. Only the stubborn resistance of Britain's military commanders saved the people of Germany from mass contamination. If Churchill had won the argument, he may have gone down in history, not as a hero, but as one of its worst war criminals, on a moral par, seemingly, with Saddam Hussein. ...

WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?
BUT MORE, IMPORTANT, WHAT WERE JESUS' FITNESS SECRETS? IF YOU WERE ONE OF THE GROWING MILLIONS OF AMERICANS LIVING IN THE MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR CHRISTIAN ALTERNACULTURE—IN WHICH EVERYTHING IN MAINSTREAM CULTURE GETS CLONED AND THEN BLEACHED OF "SINFUL" CONTENT—YOU'D KNOW. WALTER KIRN SPENDS SEVEN STRANGE DAYS WALKING IN THE SHOES OF THE FAITHFUL.

...After a wholesome scriptural breakfast of unsweetened wholegrain cereal, I start my morning with a holy workout based on a chapter from Dr. Colbert's book, "Did Jesus Exercise?" It's a question I never would have thought to ask, but in Ark culture there's a fundamental presumption that if one squeezes the Bible hard enough it will yield practical guidance on any topic, from personal finance to toilet training. And lo, it appears that the Lord did have a fitness program...

...The sound track includes a range of acts-Audio Adrenaline, P.O.D., PAX217--from the born-again-rock scene's "alternative" department. They're not that bad. They're not bad at all, in fact. Because their lyrics are mostly unintelligible, there's no way to know they're even Christian, really. And yet, in the same way one sensed that groups like Abba were singing in a language they didn't speak, one detects a certain falseness in these bands' sound. They're trying too hard, somehow. They have the formula but lack the flair. They're straining at carelessness, but deep in their hearts they do care, one suspects--about their fans, their message, their authenticity. Bottom line: They sound a bit like foreigners--highly talented Asian prodigies whose governments have equipped them with guitars and trained them in some elite punk-rock academy.

These new Christian bands rock like Americans play soccer: skillfully but somehow not convincingly.

Or maybe it's the power of suggestion that makes the stuff seem counterfeit to me. At the Family Christian Store in Bozeman, Montana, the multimedia spiritual emporium where I bought the CD and my other Ark supplies, a poster above the music racks matches name-brand acts from secular radio with their closest sanctified equivalents. For the atheist teen who has suddenly been converted and wants to carry into his new life as many of his old attitudes and tastes as he can safely manage, such a chart would prove helpful, I imagine, much as a cookbook of sugar-free recipes might help a chocoholic with diabetes. For me, though, the chart confirmed a preconception that Christian rock is a cultural oxymorona calculated, systematic rip-off, not a genuine surge of inspired energy....

...I sit in an armchair and open Desecration (subtitled Antichrist Takes the Throne). What I don't understand about these Left Behind books is how there can be so f--ing many of them, given that their subject is Armageddon. How long can a writer drag out the Second Coming? Even a trilogy would be a stretch, but ten novels going on eleven, all huge sellers, with no final volume in sight? I smell a con.

But that's because I've failed to realize this: On the Ark, the End of the World is never ending, because it's the only dramatic game in town. Drop the curtain on the Apocalypse and there are no more stories--the party's over. Which means the art of Desecration, and of the Christian thriller in general, is the art of the stall--of giving the reader a sense of forward motion without moving things any closer to a conclusion. This task is complicated by the fact that the genre's basic principles rule out new suspense. Since the heroes are assured of going to Heaven, it doesn't really matter if they die, and since the villains are bound to bum in hell, it doesn't matter if they win. Which they won't, of course. The Bible tells us so.

So why am I still reading? It's a mystery. Desecration's dialogue is preposterous ("In all candor, Anika, our intelligence reports indicated that we might face more opposition here, in the traditional homeland of several obsolete religions"), and its situations; and episodes develop in a pell-mell, miscellaneous cascade, careening from Jerusalem holy sites, where Ultimate Evil haunts the ancient shadows, to the family rooms of average midwestern homes, where true-blue Americans with names like Ray battle the Beast using laptops and ham radios. No, it must be the freakish tone that holds me: part Marvel Comics ("Mac jumped out and realized his front tires were on the edge of the gigantic crevasse") and part Sunday sermon ("We often wonder, when the truth is now so clear, why not everyone comes to Christ"). Who'd have thought such styles could ever be united? It's the prose equivalent of a sideshow monster: a snake with fur or a dolphin-flippered lady, unbearable, repulsive, yet irresistible. I decide to make this an all Armageddon day, so I pop in a tape of Megiddo: The Omega Code 2, starring Michael York as Stone Alexander, the Antichrist, and Michael Biehn as David Alexander, the straitlaced American president who opposes him and also happens to be his brother--a touch that suggests that Doomsday by itself is not sufficient but needs a soap-opera family angle too. After a brief intro by Hal Lindsay, a leading doomsayer from the 1970s and proof that a Christian can cry wolf for decades on end and still not lose his audience, the movie deals its familiar hand of cards. As in the Left Behind books, the Antichrist is an oily Eurotrash bureaucrat whose globalist rhetoric masks his raw ambition. His cosmopolitanism marks him as the Evil One as surely as David Alexander's Yankee bluntness shows he's a born lieutenant of the Lord. Does this come from the Book of Revelation? Of course not. The folks behind Megiddo and Desecration may pose as scholars of biblical prophecy, loading their products with murky sacred symbols and fancy numerological allusions, but at heart they're cornpone vaudevillians....

...Secular radio, with its sports and weather, grounds one in a specific time and place — it's rush hour, the Vikings play the Rams tonight, tomorrow it will be fair to partly cloudy —but Christian radio bypasses such trivia, conjuring up a vast eternal void in which titanic forces of good and evil struggle over man's immortal soul. Who cares if it's sunny or rainy? Details, details. Who cares about traffic conditions? The Lord is coming!

I'm amazed that regular listeners can bear such weight, yet I've spoken to some who find it soothing. They say Christian radio makes them feel cocooned, particularly when they play it in the car. It's Babylon out there, corrupt and dangerous, but they drive right on past in their little rolling tabernacles....

...Ark culture is mall Christianity. It's been malled. It's the upshot of some dumb decision that to compete with them–to compete with N'Sync and Friends and Stephen King and Matt and Katie and Abercrombie & Fitch and Jackie Chan and AOL and Sesame Street–the faithful should turn from their centuries-old tradition of fashioning transcendent art and literature and passionate folk forms such as gospel music and those outsider paintings in which Jesus has lime green bat wings and is hovering lovingly above the Pentagon flanked by exactly thirteen flying saucers, and instead of all that head down to Tower or Blockbuster and check out what's selling, then try to rip it off on a budget if possible and by employing artists who are either so devout or so plain desperate that they'll work for scale.

What makes the stuff so half-assed, so thin, so weak and cumulatively so demoralizing (even to me, a sympathetic journalist who'd secretly love to play the brash contrarian and rate the Left Behind books above Tom Clancy) has nothing to do with faith. The problem is lack of faith. Ark culture is a bad Xerox of the mainstream, not a truly distinctive or separate achievement. Without the courage to lead, it numbly follows, picking up the major media's scraps and gluing them back together with a cross on top. You like this magazine--you like GQ Then check out New Man, "America's #1 Christian Men's Magazine." Subscribe to Time, you say? Give World a chance. The covers are almost identical.

Bibleman, however, stands alone-a pearl in this vast pile of lukewarm mud. Maisie and I finally watched it together, father and daughter, the way it was meant to be, and damn it if Willie Aames of Eight Is Enough hasn't pulled off a wily deconstruction, as clever in its way as Rocky and Bullwuinkle, of all the clunky old superhero clichés. He's a guy in a mask who instead of socking people stands stock-still with his slushy gut sucked in, squares his not-broad shoulders, faces the evildoer and bores him into submission by quoting Isaiah. That's it. That's his superpower: the ability to compose at will tidy chapter-and-verse-packed sermonettes that send the villains into instant comas and, if you think like a college professor, subtly parody piety itself while also signaling to Willie's old mainstream costars that though he's doing Christian stuff these days, he's smarter than all of them and he'll be back. I'm serious: This Bibleman show has layers....

The hunt for weapons of mass destruction yields - nothing
Intelligence claims of huge Iraqi stockpiles were wrong, says report

Julian Borger in Washington, Ewen MacAskill and Patrick Wintour
Thursday September 25, 2003
The Guardian

An intensive six-month search of Iraq for weapons of mass destruction has failed to discover a single trace of an illegal arsenal, according to accounts of a report circulating in Washington and London.

The interim report, compiled by the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group (ISG) of 1,400 weapons experts and support staff, will instead focus on Saddam Hussein's capacity and intentions to build banned weapons.

A draft of the report has been sent to the White House, the Pentagon and Downing Street, a US intelligence source said. It has caused such disappointment that there is now a debate over whether it should be released to Congress over the next fortnight, as had been widely expected....

LUTHER
directed by Eric Till

Before the Reformation, the meaning of life came highly structured from the hierarchy of the Church. One didn't ask questions. One didn't need to.

Many believers, perhaps most, experienced Truth through relics, images, and rituals—not as oppression but as comfort. To be sure, one did not meet God face to face. But one did not want to! For the late-medieval rank and file, assurance of salvation came not from bold access to the throne of God, but from the myriad mediating practices of penance and devotion.

In Luther, one scene in particular brings home this historical reality. Glowing with joy, a young mother who has purchased an indulgence (a remission of temporal punishment) for her crippled daughter holds it out to a gaunt Martin Luther: "Look what I bought for Greta!" She has been gulled by the rhetoric of the charlatan indulgence-seller, Johann Tetzel (Alfred Molina).

Luther (Joseph Fiennes) takes the paper and reads it. His anger at the corrupt establishment rises and boils over. He forgets the gentleness he has displayed toward her. "This is worthless," he says, crumpling it in his fist. "You must rely on God's love." Crestfallen, she turns and walks disconsolately away.

At several key moments in the movie, Luther faces the charge that he is tearing apart the church. He grapples repeatedly with the possibility that he is destroying, rather than building, God's kingdom. To their credit, though, the filmmakers resist the temptation of portraying a Lone Ranger Reformer against a thoroughly evil Church. There are enough sympathetic figures in the Catholic establishment (Matthieu Carriere's Cardinal Cajetan chief among them) to create some sense of historical nuance.

Moreover, we get to see some warts of the Reformation. Andreas Karlstadt (Jochen Horst) takes Luther's teachings to their extreme, announcing that the day of the great leveling has arrived. Soon we see townspeople dragging the monks who have cared for them out of their church and pummeling them. Rocks crash through stained-glass windows. A crucifix is knocked to the floor. (The scene involves a bit of historical sleight-of-hand: the real Karlstadt, advocating nonviolence, had refused to join the militant radical reformer Thomas Müntzer.)

Luther is still a medieval man; this anarchic attack on authority is too much for him. He appeals to the princes, demanding the peasant revolt be put down. Soon the blood of the peasants runs on the floor of the ruined church.

Surveying the carnage, Luther agonizes: "I have torn the world apart." He begins to slide into depression. He must force himself out of bed each morning. Until, that is—in a moment befitting Hollywood—he meets the escaped nun Katerina (Claire Cox). Sunny but steel-willed, Katerina leads Luther from the dark tunnel and into the summer of the loving marriage he has long denied himself....

But Foreign Aid Is Bribery!
And Blackmail, Extortion, and Theft Too!
by Jacob G. Hornberger, September 26, 2003

Horrors! Sen. Edward Kennedy has thrown the Washington establishment into turmoil by making the shocking observation that the Bush administration is using U.S. foreign aid to bribe foreign governments to support its occupation of Iraq. "My belief is this money is being shuffled all around to these political leaders in all parts of the world, bribing them to send in troops," Kennedy said, causing Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to describe the accusation as "disgusting" and "false."

The real reason that everyone is so upset is that Kennedy has spoken the truth. The plain and simple truth is that foreign aid is nothing more than an integral and perverse part of the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, not only because its primary purpose is to bribe, blackmail, and extort foreign regimes into doing Washington's bidding, but also because of the enormously destructive consequences it has. ...

...For example, when Yemen voted against a UN resolution authorizing United States to use force against Iraq in 1990, UN Ambassador Thomas Pickering walked over to the Yemeni ambassador and said, "That’s the most expensive No vote you ever cast." According to writer John Pilger, "Within three days, a U.S aid program to one of the world’s poorest countries was stopped. Yemen suddenly had problems with the World Bank and the IMF; and 800,000 Yemeni workers were expelled from Saudi Arabia."...

Warrant mix-up leads police to wrong house
Couple shocked by officers' behavior, damage

By NANCY J. SULOK
Tribune Staff Writer

David Dance stands in front of his home at 1909 E. Donald St. in South Bend where he was awakened about 3 a.m. Thursday by police officers who were attempting to serve an arrest warrant for someone who apparently lives in a neighboring home.

Tribune Photo/JASON MILLER

SOUTH BEND -- South Bend police apparently were at the wrong house early Thursday when they tried to serve a warrant to arrest a man wanted on drug charges.

The residents they awakened said they were traumatized by the police conduct and upset about the damage they said was done by the officers.

"Those idiots went to the wrong house and then tried to cover it up," David Dance said....

...He said he opened the door and turned on a light but didn't see anybody. He noticed that his motion-sensitive security system was not on.

Then "a flashlight was shined in my face through our glass porch door and I was ordered to open the door,'' Dance said.

"I asked, 'Who are you?' and 'What is this about?' '' Dance said. "I was again ordered to open the glass porch door. I repeated, 'Who are you?' and 'What is this about?' ''

None of the officers identified themselves as the police, Dance said.

"That's not how we should do business," Fautz said.

He added, however, that the light-in-the-eyes tactic sometimes is used for officer safety.

Dance said he didn't know if he was going to be robbed or if the man outside was really a police officer.

"It was my fiancee who saw the officers standing there in the flanking positions with their guns drawn,'' he said. "We thought we were dead."

He said the officer moved down to the sidewalk, "again instructed me to open the door, failing to identify himself or his reason for being there, but I could now see he had his gun drawn as well.''

Only when the officer lowered the flashlight was Dance able to see the police uniform. He said four officers were surrounding his home....

QUOTE OF THE DAY
The war on terror involves Saddam Hussein because of the nature of Saddam Hussein, the history of Saddam Hussein, and his willingness to terrorize himself.
-- President George W. Bush, The Boston Globe, January 30

Rumors of Another World
Christian writer Philip Yancey says we need to get better at reading the signs of God's presence.
Interview by Paul O'Donnell

Reviewers have called this "another dark book from Philip Yancey." Do you think you've become darker?
No. [Laughs.] Actually, I hope the opposite. The church has not handled this whole idea of two worlds very well, historically. It often rejects the visible world as full of danger. So you have hermits who go into the desert, and you have the church's reputation as being anti-sex--about which you can make a good case.

What I'm trying to do is bring those two worlds together in a little more healthy way. If you look at sex in a different way, as God's creation, as a gift that he has given us, but one that is best used in a way that he describes, it can be a very powerful rumor of what God is like, what the world should be like. So I'm trying to move toward a more positive embrace of the good things of this world--these gifts of God. That's what we are here to explore and to enjoy--not to exploit, but to explore and enjoy not as ends in themselves, but as pointers, rumors toward what God is really like.

But you do seem somewhat pessimistic about our society.
Jacques Ellul said, isn't it odd that the nations that are most penetrated by the gospel tend to produce societies which are least like the gospel—that's my paraphrase. I travel a lot internationally, about four trips a year, and from the standpoint of the rest of the world, it's seems to be true. What describes America? Well, what describes America is wealth, military might, power, and sexual license. All those would be very different from the kind of values that Jesus spent his life talking about. And yet they would also say America is the most Christian nation on Earth....

But don't Christians often say, "This isn't the real plane of existence, and therefore, I'm not going to invest in it?" Isn't that a danger of belief in general?
That's a huge danger. The church has tilted in that direction a lot. I wrote this book to bring us back to reclaim the world. The church has pretty well given up on the natural world. They no longer even point to it as a rumor, or as an expression of God's creativity. To me the most obvious thing about God is his creativity, his love of beauty. Hiking in the Rocky Mountains, you come across meadows just full of wildflowers that no one has seen for thousands of years. There are the beauties of the Great Barrier Reef. The world is spangled with beauty.

That's the most obvious thing we can learn about God. He is a creative being who honors beauty. That is a loud rumor, and just to give that away to the scientists and let that be their realm to me is to have blinders on.

French card deck names 'most dangerous' U.S. leaders

PARIS, France (AP) -- The ace of spades? Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gets the honor in a new French deck of cards. President Bush is the king of diamonds and Osama bin Laden the joker.

The game takes a jab at the famous deck of cards created for U.S. soldiers hunting down ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and other leaders from the deposed regime.

"I found it completely indecent to present a manhunt as a game," said Thierry Meyssan, the man behind the French deck. "We thought this card game would allow us to ... explain why we consider the government of George Bush a threat to international security." ...

New Bridge Strategies, LLC is a unique company that was created specifically with the aim of assisting clients to evaluate and take advantage of business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the U.S.-led war in Iraq. Its activities will seek to expedite the creation of free and fair markets and new economic growth in Iraq, consistent with the policies of the Bush Administration. The opportunities evolving in Iraq today are of such an unprecedented nature and scope that no other existing firm has the necessary skills and experience to be effective both in Washington, D.C. and on the ground in Iraq. It is for this reason that we have created New Bridge Strategies and brought together the knowledge of American business professionals with over 25 years of experience in Iraq and throughout the Middle East and the political experience of some of the most successful governmental and political professionals in Washington, D.C., and London to provide a complete package of business services offering:

* Assistance to companies engaging the U.S. Government process to develop post war opportunities

* Identification of market opportunities and potential partners

* On-the-ground support in Iraq

* Legal, technical, cultural and potentially financial support for ventures

New Bridge Strategies maintains a physical presence with staff on the ground in Beirut, Damascus, Geneva, Houston and Washington, D.C., and it has plans to expand into Iraq as soon as is possible....

How to ruin a great army? See Donald Rumsfeld

By JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY
Knight Ridder Newspapers

Armies are fragile institutions, and for all their might, easily broken.

It took the better part of 20 years to rebuild the Army from the wreckage of Vietnam. With the hard work of a generation of young officers, blooded in Vietnam and determined that the mistake would never be repeated, a new Army rose Phoenix-like from the ashes of the old, now perhaps the finest Army in history.

In just over two years, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and his civilian aides have done just about everything they could to destroy that Army....

Wait a second. I want to gripe about worship music :-/

In today's selection of contemporary "I'm gonna Praise and Worship" songs, there was a generous sprinkling of references to 'Your presence." We seek Your presence. Your presence is a treasure. We've come into your presence. Show us your presence and so on.

I sat there wondering if this is the modern "I'm gonna Praise and Worship" movement chasing its own tail? Is the "presence" of God mentioned in these songs largely a code word for the experience called "feeling God's presence" that is roughly the equal of having a really good band/group lead in some highly emotive praise choruses? In other words, are the songs saying "We are really excited about getting the feeling that God is around, and the best way to get that feeling is these songs."?

Breaking up isn't hard to do: Hit 'send'
By Chris Gray
Inquirer Staff Writer

Dawn Capone thought instant-messaging would be a good way to "talk" with her boyfriend of six months when his cell-phone battery died.

Wrong. On their first IM "date," the man - a 36-year-old computer consultant from West Philadelphia - made Capone a victim of the latest form of commitment-phobia haunting singles: the Internet dump.

"I am breaking up with you," the boyfriend typed, as Capone watched aghast at the keyboard at her home in Blackwood.

"We are no longer a couple."

"I am logging off" - and he was gone....

The Commercialization of Intimate Life (The Atlantic Monthly | October 2003)
by Arlie Russell Hochschild
University of California Press

....Feminism is to the commercial spirit of intimate life as Protestantism is to the spirit of capitalism. The first legitimates the second. The second borrows from but also transforms the first.... Especially in their more recent incarnation, the commercial substitutes for family activities often turn out to be better than the real thing. Just as the French bakery often makes better bread than mother ever did, and the cleaning service cleans the house more thoroughly, so therapists may recognize feelings more accurately, and childcare workers prove more even-tempered than parents. In a sense, capitalism isn't competing with itself, one company against another, but with the family, and particularly with the role of wife and mother....

...When in the mid-nineteenth century, men were drawn into market life and women remained outside it, female homemakers formed a moral brake on capitalism. Now American women are its latest recruits, offered membership in the public side of market society on the same harsh terms as those offered to American men. The result makes for a harshness of life that seems so normal to us we don't see it....

Under the Tuscan Sun
...While real peoples' divorce recovery plans typically entail curling up on the kitchen in pools of their own urine for several days, Frances takes a trip to Tuscany, where she purchases an old house and begins that journey back toward the realization that life is beautiful. This whole "life is beautiful" epiphany comes surprisingly easily when one is staring out at the Tuscan countryside and looks like Diane Lane....

NOTES IN THE MARGIN
It may be in poor taste to say "I told you so!" – but it cannot be said enough to those who won't recant their support of this rotten, failing, morally indefensible war. Didn't we tell them that each and every rationale for war was a brazen lie, most especially the alleged Iraqi "link" to Al Qaeda? The visit of 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague never happened. The mysterious terrorist training camp in Iraq supposedly utilized by Al Qaeda somehow never turned up. Out of all those documents that the London Telegraph "found" in the rubble, all those tall tales of secret messages passed back and forth between the Iraqi dictator and agents of Osama bin Forgotten, all those thousands of words written by Laurie Mylroie and other fantasists "proving" Iraqi complicity with Al Qaeda – nothing! Vanished, along with those infamous weapons of mass destruction, in the fog of war. ...

Guards allegedly set up man's prison rape
Associated Press
Sept. 24, 2003 02:25 PM

FRESNO, Calif. - In a lawsuit set to go to trial Wednesday, an inmate claims prison guards punished him by setting up his rape by a convicted murderer who was so notorious for abuse that he was known as the "Booty Bandit."

Scheduled witnesses at the federal trial include Wayne Robertson, who has acknowledged raping and torturing Eddie Webb Dillard and said the guards intentionally put Dillard in his cell.....

Thursday, September 25, 2003

Wal-Mart wedding draws crowd to garden center
By LAURA McKNIGHT
For the Courier

Newlyweds Mary Halford and Lloyd Forsythe walk down the aisle of the east Houma Wal-Mart after they exchanged vows in the store’s garden center Saturday.

HOUMA -- Marriages are made in heaven, but sometimes they are assembled at Wal-Mart.

Lloyd Forsythe, 41, and east-Houma Wal-Mart employee Mary Halford, 47, are now planning their honeymoon following a packed wedding ceremony Saturday in the garden center of the Grand Caillou Road superstore, the place where they met and became engaged. ...

Concerns about citizen privacy grow as states create 'Matrix' database

By Jim Krane, Associated Press, 9/24/2003

NEW YORK -- While privacy worries are frustrating the Pentagon's plans for a far-reaching database to combat terrorism, a similar project is quietly taking shape with the participation of more than a dozen states -- and $12 million in federal funds. The database project, created so states and local authorities can track would-be terrorists as well as criminal fugitives, is being built and housed in the offices of a private company but will be open to some federal law enforcers and perhaps even US intelligence agencies.
ADVERTISEMENT

Dubbed Matrix, the database has been in use for a year and a half in Florida, where police praise the crime-fighting tool as nimble and exhaustive. It cross-references the state's driving records and restricted police files with billions of pieces of public and private data, including credit and property records.

But privacy advocates, officials in two states, and a competing data vendor have branded Matrix as playing fast and loose with Americans' private details.

They say that Matrix houses restricted police and government files on colossal databases that sit in the offices of Seisint Inc., a Boca Raton, Fla., company founded by a millionaire who police say flew planeloads of drugs into the country in the early 1980s....

Liquid Church by Pete Ward

Liquid Church by Pete Ward is a book that I have been meaning to review for many months. At first glance you look at its hundred and eight pages and you think, "no problem". The book is not a book of practices of a parish called Liquid Church but rather a collection of theories and ideas and each one of them must be thought about and mulled over in the context of you local church. On top of that, the book is visionary and gives a picture of a church that is not here or is only in its infancies.

What is Liquid Church? Liquid Church is a response to our rapidly changing society. Where the local parish at one time was built by farmers and manufacturers who were geographically stable. As we move to a geographically and culturally fluid culture where change comes in many shapes, ways and sizes, the church needs to be more flexible to move through, around, and in amongst today's culture.....

...Solid modernity is based on our victory of the settled over the nomad; it is a culture of production rather then consumption and above all is linked to ways of organizing production that were first developed by the car maker Henry Ford. Modernity was shaped by the Fordist principles of expansion, size, plant, boundaries, norms, rules, and class orientated affinities and identities. - 16

The local church may support many good and important activities, including mission trips, evangelism, youth ministry, social projects, and so on, but they are all assessed in terms of their effect or otherwise on regular Sunday attendance. People may turn to Christ through the youth mission or Alpha course, and this is good, but they are not banked, they really don't count, until they start to attend Sunday services. - 17

I have sometimes felt that the real purpose of the church services is to enable clergy to count the congregation. This is probably a little cynical, but solid church finds its main sense of success in the number of people who attend on a Sunday. Regular church attendance is seen as being a significant test of spiritual health, and church growth is measured in size of congregations. The importance of Sunday attendance and congregational size can never be underestimated for solid church. - 18

The emphasis upon attendance at one central service enables ministers to see easily if people are starting to flag in their spiritual lives. We might attend to hear the preacher, but clergy often attend because they want to see us there. The system of counting sheep and making sure they attend can lead us into unhealthy relationships pf surveillance and control. Ministers sometimes express frustration with the way that a central service restricts their ability to experiment and be creative, and the weight of being responsible for the regular attendance of members can be intolerable. As a youth minister in a church I felt something of this pressure. When the numbers of young people sitting in the back pew increased, I was doing well, but if they started to decrease, questions were asked. The implication was that it was my job to look after their spiritual health, and this was assessed in terms of their regular attendance on Sunday mornings. - 19

In solid modernity the size of the factory building was a major sign of success. Extending the production facility was the aim of the business. Similarly sold church focus on buildings to hold more people and process more activities - 19

Solid church is built on the assumption that it is good for large numbers of very different people to meet in the same room and do the same sort of thing together. Worship therefore becomes a one-size-fits-all environment. The result is that we provide a rather bland and inoffensive diet of middle of the road music and safe spirituality. Variety in what we have to offer is severely limited by the tastes and prejudices of those who attend. Extremes are tempered because one of the key values is that we do not offend anyone who comes to church regularly. - 19

One size fits all is made into a virtue by those who run solid church. Everything about regular Sunday worship is designed to make us feel that even if we don't like it, we should still attend because it is good for us. As with cough medicine, we endure the bad taste because we are told that it is doing us good. - 20

Solid church does not disappear in liquid modernity; rather, it experiences a subtle mutation. Just as in modernity the premodern aspects of church continued, so in liquid modernity the premodern, parish-based church and the modern congregation or gathered church also continue. But while they may exist, they do not remain unchanged by the fluidity of people's lives and the surrounding culture. Liquid modernity brings out the mutation in the parish and in the congregation. These changes have emerged almost imperceptibly, so much so that many church leaders may not have noticed what has happened. Those running parishes and congregations think that they are doing what the church has always done. Unfortunately neither the congregation nor the people in the wider parish have stood still. Liquid modernity has seeped under the church door and into the sanctuary. - 25...

Bad Moon on the rise
Overcoming his church's bizarre reputation and his own criminal record, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon has cemented ties with the Bush administration -- and gained government funding for his closest disciples....

Why Liberals Should Read the Bible
The Bible doesn't go away if we don't read it. Others just tell us what it says.
By John A. Buehrens
Today many otherwise well-informed, intelligent people--religious liberals, seekers after wisdom and justice, even skeptics and the news media--often speak as though the Bible says and means only what fundamentalists say it says and means.

This shows not only a lack of understanding but also a failure of maturity and wisdom. Those who reject or neglect the Bible fail to recognize that to "throw the Bible out" because others have turned it into an idol, or because you don't accept what you take to be the conventional understanding of its teachings, doesn't mean that it ever goes away. Rather, it simply means that it ends up only in the hands and on the lips of others--often reactionary others--where it can and will be used against you.

How did we happen to give away our right to question religious authority and to interpret the Bible for ourselves?...

...But now we come to the third and most personal reason: You also can't be spiritually mature or wise by simply rejecting the Bible as oppressive. The oppressive uses of the Bible are real, but unless you learn to understand that there are other readings possible, the Bible will, indeed, simply continue to be a source of oppression for you, and not a source of inspiration, liberation, creation, and even exultation as you understand it anew for yourself, at a deeper and less literal level.

Why the myth of Republican competence persists, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
By Joshua Micah Marshall

Let's be honest. As upset as you may have been in January 2001 that George W. Bush was going to be president, you had to admit he had a pretty impressive team. They had beaten a sitting vice president with seemingly every advantage; they outmuscled and outmaneuvered the Gore camp during the Florida recount; and despite the abbreviated transition, they quickly and smoothly assembled a seasoned White House staff. Many top appointees were in their second or third tour of government service; they exuded experience and know-how--and not just in the splendid isolation of academia or the permissive chaos of campaign work, but in the rugged practicalities of commanding American industry. Dick Cheney was the signature figure: a former White House chief of staff, congressman, and wartime defense secretary, whose vaunted government savvy had been validated in the private sector as CEO of the energy giant Halliburton. Like the administration, Cheney was right-wing, but in a way that was at once daunting and oddly reassuring. You may not have liked what he was doing. But you had little doubt that he knew what he was doing.

Today, that record doesn't look nearly so impressive. ...

THE BIG LIE
JOHN PILGER REVEALS WMDs WERE JUST A PRETEXT FOR PLANNED WAR ON IRAQ

EXACTLY one year ago, Tony Blair told Parliament: "Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programme is active, detailed and growing.

"The policy of containment is not working. The weapons of mass destruction programme is not shut down. It is up and running now."

Not only was every word of this false, it was part of a big lie invented in Washington within hours of the attacks of September 11 2001 and used to hoodwink the American public and distract the media from the real reason for attacking Iraq. "It was 95 per cent charade," a former senior CIA analyst told me.

An investigation of files and archive film for my TV documentary Breaking The Silence, together with interviews with former intelligence officers and senior Bush officials have revealed that Bush and Blair knew all along that Saddam Hussein was effectively disarmed.

Both Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, and Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's closest adviser, made clear before September 11 2001 that Saddam Hussein was no threat - to America, Europe or the Middle East.

In Cairo, on February 24 2001, Powell said: "He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours."

This is the very opposite of what Bush and Blair said in public.

Powell even boasted that it was the US policy of "containment" that had effectively disarmed the Iraqi dictator - again the very opposite of what Blair said time and again. On May 15 2001, Powell went further and said that Saddam Hussein had not been able to "build his military back up or to develop weapons of mass destruction" for "the last 10 years". America, he said, had been successful in keeping him "in a box".

Two months later, Condoleezza Rice also described a weak, divided and militarily defenceless Iraq. "Saddam does not control the northern part of the country," she said. "We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."...

Let the neo-cons bellow, just bring the troops home

George, here's what to do in Iraq: Declare victory and bring the troops home. ...

...The warrior intellectuals — the neoconservatives — will bellow. Let them. They don't have any electoral votes. The American people never bought their "neo-Wilsonian" fantasies of empire. Asserting American dominance was never your argument for war. You said Americans had to depose Saddam Hussein in order to protect themselves.

That's done.

Our occupation of Iraq is not yet six months old and already Iraqis are making sure that we tire of it. This will not tend to get better. An antiwar feeling has arisen in the United States, and Howard Dean, a nobody from a small state, has ridden it to the head of the pack. Dean says he wouldn't have gone to war in the first place. Few notice that Dean also says we ought to stay in Iraq to do nation-building.

"Well, Howard," you can say, "I'm bringing the troops home. If you're elected, you can send them back." ...

An open invitation to election fraud
Not only is the country's leading touch-screen voting system so badly designed that votes can be easily changed, but its manufacturer is run by a die-hard GOP donor who vowed to deliver his state for Bush next year....

Wednesday, September 24, 2003

Bush's Latest UN Visit: More Misleading
09/23/2003 @ 8:56pm

Once more, George W. Bush has assaulted the truth in front of the United Nations. A year ago, he launched his push for war with a speech before the General Assembly that was filled with distortions to set the stage for the invasion to come. (See here.) This time around, Bush was defending his war against Saddam Hussein and the occupation and again relied on misrepresentations. "The regime of Saddam Hussein," he claimed, "cultivated ties to terror while it built weapons of mass destruction. It used those weapons in acts of mass murder." This is a slippery rendition of what's known. Hussein may have "cultivated" contacts with terrorists, but the Bush administration has yet to demonstrate he had developed any operational ties to al Qaeda. And built WMDs? Certainly, he did so in the past--before UN inspectors in the mid-1990s reported that they had destroyed most of his WMDs. But there's no undeniable proof he was manufacturing WMDs more recently. In fact, a classified Defense Intelligence Agency analysis produced in October 2002 noted that there was no reliable evidence that Hussein was n=making chemical weapons. ...

Press Remarks with Foreign Minister of Egypt Amre Moussa

Secretary Colin L. Powell
Cairo, Egypt (Ittihadiya Palace)
February 24, 2001

...QUESTION: The Egyptian press editorial commentary that we have seen here has been bitterly aggressive in denouncing the U.S. role and not welcoming you. I am wondering whether you believe you accomplished anything during your meetings to assuage concerns about the air strikes against Iraq and the continuing sanctions?

SECRETARY POWELL: I received a very warm welcome from the leaders and I know there is some unhappiness as expressed in the Egyptian press. I understand that, but at the same time, with respect to the no-fly zones and the air strikes that we from time to time must conduct to defend our pilots, I just want to remind everybody that the purpose of those no-fly zones and the purpose of those occasional strikes to protect our pilots, is not to pursue an aggressive stance toward Iraq, but to defend the people that the no-fly zones are put in to defend. The people in the southern part of Iraq and the people in the northern part of Iraq, and these zones have a purpose, and their purpose is to protect people -- protect Arabs -- not to affect anything else in the region. And we have to defend ourselves.

We will always try to consult with our friends in the region so that they are not surprised and do everything we can to explain the purpose of our responses. We had a good discussion, the Foreign Minister and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions -- the fact that the sanctions exist -- not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein's ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place, but we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people but does affect the Iraqi regime's ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and we had a good conversation on this issue....

Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they've had to

Sept. 19 - A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure....

...Then she listened as another panelist and I went through the now-familiar recitation of Washington's claims before the war, and the too-familiar realities since: the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and the inevitable conclusion that Saddam Hussein was not the threat he was cracked up to be, the fantasy that this war could be waged on the cheap rather than the $1 billion per week American taxpayers are now spending, the claim that occupation - called"liberation" - would be short and sweet, when in fact American men and women continue to be shot and blown up every day with no end in sight.

As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman's problem was not that she didn't believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.

It's not the first time I've come across this reaction. I just spent a month in the States and met a lot of angry people. A few claim the press is not reporting "the good things in Iraq," although it's very hard to see what's good for Americans there. Many more say, "Why didn't the press warn us?"

We did, of course. Many of us who cover the region - along with the CIA and the State Department and the uniformed military - have been warning for at least a year that occupying Iraq would be a dirty, costly, long and dangerous job.

The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can't believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naivete', arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they're in a deep state of denial about it.

Again and again, you hear people offering their own "real" reasons for invading Iraq - conspiracy theories spun not to condemn, but to condone the administration's actions. Thus the "real" reason for taking out Saddam Hussein, some say, was to eliminate this man who rewarded the families of suicide bombers and posed as an implacable enemy of Israel. (Yet the bombings go on there, and surely the chaos in Iraq does nothing for the long-term security of the Jewish state.) Or the "real" reason for invading Iraq was to intimidate Syria and Iran. Yet Tehran, if anything, has grown more aggressive, and may actually have stepped up its nuclear weapons program to deter the United States. (After all, that strategy worked for North Korea.) Or the "real" reason was to secure America's long-term supply of oil, but the destabilization of the region, again, may make that more tenuous, not less....

Bush begs at "irrelevant" UN
How irrelevant is an organization if you go before it and grovel?

Bush spoke at the United Nations today. Of course he didn't apologize for the mess he created. Of course he didn't apologize for the middle finger he gave the world body. Of course he didn't apologize for lying to get his war on.

"The regime of Saddam Hussein cultivated ties to terror while it built weapons of mass destruction. It used those weapons in acts of mass murder, and refused to account for them when confronted by the world," Bush said.

What's funny is he trots out these same tired old lines, knowing darn well everyone knows they are lies and exaggerations.

Ties to terror? Weapons of mass destruction? This has all been disproven time and time again, and the diplomats at the UN aren't idiots. They know what the real evidence shows. They know that Blair is under intense pressure in the UK for his lies. They know the US public is abandoning Bush in droves.

And all Bush can say is, "I told you so! Now line up behind me!" It's bizarre.

But not surprising. Bush himself told Fox that he "insulates" himself from the world outside, and only listens to news filtered by his own staff.

Bush said he insulates himself from the "opinions" that seep into news coverage by getting his news from his own aides. He said he scans headlines, but rarely reads news stories.

"I appreciate people's opinions, but I'm more interested in news," the president said. "And the best way to get the news is from objective sources, and the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world."

And what is more objective than the words given by Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of the Chickenhawk Cabal?...

Is a Partial Gospel Really Good News? by Joel McClure

I wonder what Paul would say were he to sit in on much of what is called ‘evangelism’ in America. Would Paul point out inadequacies with what passes for ‘good news’ in contemporary communities of Jesus’ disciples? From what he wrote in his letters and from what Luke records of his activities, it is quite probable that Paul would take issue with the presentation of today’s version of ‘good news.’ What might Paul of Tarsus say is wrong with ‘evangelism’ in its early 21st century American ‘evangelical’ incarnation? What corrections might need to be made to our message and, in light of that, our methods?

Extracted from the full, rich, and enculturated writings of the New Testament authors, distilled down to palatable and marketable ‘timeless truths’, and compressed into short pithy statements, the ‘evangelistic’ message today presents itself in roughly the following formula: You are a sinner. Sinners go to hell. Believe that Jesus died for your sins and ‘paid the price’ for you. (Perhaps) be baptized—depending on your particular denominational affiliation. Publicly profess your agreement with a certain list of doctrinal statements. So that you can have assurance that you will go to heaven when you die. ...

... We need to stop trying to fit the gospel onto bumper stickers. Todd Hunter’s hypothesis that “something went drastically wrong when a reductionistic rendering of the Gospel got married to the American marketing machine” suggests that minimalization, while perhaps expedient, is not helpful in the long run. This is a big story and it takes time to get your mind around. It also takes more than words to understand it. We can be honest with people and say, “This story is too big for me to tell you in four sentences. Can we walk together for a few years so you can see it properly?”

We need to stop thinking in terms of converting people in one conversation, and start thinking of discipling people in terms of years (with conversion perhaps taking place somewhere along the way). This will not necessarily take place in formal contexts. It may even take place without people knowing it at first. ...

Prosecutors withheld evidence to obtain death sentence, said defense
By Kara Covington - Sierra Times.com

KNOXVILLE, TENN- Imagine being convicted and sentenced to death for a murder you knew nothing about and were not even in the same county when the crime took place— that is exactly what death row inmate, Olen Hutchison, claimed he has been coping with since his conviction in 1990. ...

...According to Dana Hansen, an attorney with Federal Defender Services, prosecutors informed the jury that Hutchison knew about the murder in advance and helped to plan it because Huddleston owed him a large amount of money. However, Hansen said this was a false statement and the prosecution knew it at the time they presented the argument.

Hutchison had loaned Huddleston money but the date had not passed for the money to be returned, therefore Huddleston was not late on his payments to Hutchison and Hansen said prosectors knew this and withheld the evidence.

“Prosecutors have twice manipulated and withheld evidence, first to convict Hutchison, then to deny him his right to appeal,” said Hansen. ...

Do Poor Fathers Deserve Debtors' Prison?

This Thursday, Sept. 25, 16 fathers (at last count) will begin a hunger strike to draw media attention to issues like the imprisonment of "deadbeat dads."

The group, Hunger Strike for Justice, estimates the total number of fathers incarcerated in the U.S. for failure to pay child support is 250,000.

This estimate seems high given that the entire prison population is somewhat over two million, but it is difficult to argue because no official statistics exist.

A more useful question to ask, however, is: What does throwing a "deadbeat dad" in jail accomplish?

That's the question recently asked by a Texas judge who recommended releasing from jail 112 men who were behind county bars because they hadn't paid child support. (No women were imprisoned on the charge.) The judge doubted the wisdom of throwing non-violent parents into a badly overcrowded jail system because they were in debt. After all, there is no statistical proof that imprisonment motivates a father who can pay court-ordered child support to do so; imprisonment prevents those unable to pay from earning money....

..."Divorced Dads: Shattering the Myths" (1998) remains the most extensive federally funded study on divorced fathers. Conducted by Dr. Sanford Braver of Arizona State University, it found that the stereotypical deadbeat dad "does not exist in significant numbers." Many if not most of delinquent fathers are unable to pay their child support, especially when it is coupled with steep interest charges for falling behind....

Ten Myths About Church Leavers

Alan Jaimieson

Despite the almost mantra-like status of the statement "people are leaving the church" there still appears to be little understanding about who is leaving, when they leave, why they leave, and what happens to them and their faith after they leave. Of course everyone has their own view on these issues but few, especially our church leaders, have taken the time to sit down and talk with an actual leaver or two.

It is much easier dealing with stereotypes than actual people, even if the stereotypes don't help us understand what is really going on. For those interested in moving beyond the stereotypes and asking: "Who are these people who are leaving our churches?" an examination of some myths about church leavers may prove helpful....

Emerging Values
The next generation is redefining spiritual formation, community, and mission.
Brian D. McLaren

I snuck into pastoral ministry via the English department rather than the theology department. I wasn't planning on being a pastor, but you know how these things go.

There was a moment in graduate school (it was the late '70s) that I won't forget. Not the moment one of my freshman comp students (I had a teaching fellowship) told me he had trouble with spelling, so he wanted to turn in his composition assignments on cassette tape instead of on paper.

No, it was the moment I "got it" regarding a strange new school of literary theory, then associated with the terms "post-structuralism" and "deconstruction." A chill ran up my neck, and two thoughts seized me:

1. If this way of thinking catches on, the whole world will change.

2. If this way of thinking catches on, the Christian faith as we know it is in a heap of trouble.

I couldn't have articulated why these thoughts so gripped me back then, but my intuition was right, I think. I was "getting" some facet of what we now term "postmodernism," a way of thinking that has both continuities and discontinuities with the modernity from which it grows, in which it is rooted, and against which (perhaps like a teenager coming of age) it reacts.

Another moment came in the early '90s. I had left college teaching to pastor a church. A newcomer to our church, a spiritual seeker, highly educated, highly motivated, and highly skeptical of easy answers was asking tough questions, I was giving (thanks to C. S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, and Josh McDowell) my best apologetics-informed replies, and I wasn't getting through.

My linear Liar-Lunatic-or-Lord arguments, either-or propositions, and watertight belief system didn't enhance the credibility of the gospel for my new friend; rather, they made the gospel seem less credible, maybe even a little cheap and shallow....

... Compare modern Christianity's quest for the perfect belief system to medieval church architecture. Christians in the emerging culture may look back on our doctrinal structures (statements of faith, systematic theologies) as we look back on medieval cathedrals: possessing a real beauty that should be preserved, but now largely vacant, not inhabited or used much anymore, more tourist attraction than holy place.

Many of us can't imagine this.

If Christianity isn't the quest for (or defense of) the perfect belief system ("the church of the last detail"), then what's left? In the emerging culture, I believe it will be "Christianity as a way of life," or "Christianity as a path of spiritual formation."

The switch suggests a change in the questions people are asking. Instead of "How can I be right in my belief so I can go to heaven?" the new question seems to be, "How can we live life to the full so God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven?"

Instead of "If you were to die tonight, do you know for certain that you would spend eternity with God in heaven?" the new question seems to be, "If you live for another thirty years, what kind of person will you become?"

I'm not certain any postmodern churches exist quite yet. But even in modern churches we can feel a rising tension, a fomenting discontent: why aren't we making better disciples? Why aren't people becoming more holy, joyful, peaceful, content, and Christ-like?

Why, in a Christian subculture served by 24-hour Christian radio-TV, bathed in books and periodicals of unparalleled quality and quantity, instructed by a state-of-the-art seminary system, and inspired by a state-of-the-heart worship music industry â€¦ why are so few of our good Christian people good Christians?

Why is Prozac needed by so many? Why are the most biblically-knowledgeable so often so mean-spirited? Why are our pastors dejected so often? Why do our speakers (both human and electronic) have to blare so loudly to get a response, and even then, why is the response so shallow or temporary?

That discontent may be the ending point for many of us, but it is the starting point for our brothers and sisters of the emerging culture. If Christianity doesn't bear fruit in a way or rhythm or pattern of life that yields Christ-likeness in real measure, they aren't interested. Being "saved" is suspect if people aren't being transformed.

That's why, I believe, we see such a resurgence of interest in Roman Catholic and Orthodox writers, especially pre-modern ones. To find this emphasis on the "renovation of the heart," we have to go back (with few exceptions), way back, to St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Benedict, Ignatius, the Fathers. That's why good Baptists and Presbyterians find themselves signing up for spiritual direction at a local Catholic monastery. ...

...I'm not surprised that megachurches developed in late modernity. In a culture that believed secular science and secular government could solve most of our problems, a culture that assumed religion in general and the church in particular were declining industries, it made sense that Christians would find comfort and confidence in large herds.

"See? We're significant! We're big and strong!" our large numbers said to an unbelieving culture that tried to dismiss us. (I am not "against" megachurches. They have and will have many advantages, but ironically, their size may become an increasing disadvantage.)

What happens when the climate changes, when "post-secular" is an accepted term to describe our times, when ivory tower intellectuals join pierced-and-tattooed teenagers in saying, "I'm not religious, but I am spiritual"?

Now large numbers become less important: quantity of people becomes less important than quality of relationships. So the "church growth" of the '80s and '90s has given way to the quest for community. This quest is essential, but it's also risky and hard....

...It's no surprise that in this fragmented world, community becomes a higher value, even though it is so darned hard to achieve and sustain. It's no surprise that interest in house churches increases in these times, where the shared life of a few is so important that even bothering with public worship is optional.

Throwing a small-groups program at this hunger for community is like feeding an elephant Cheerios, one by one. What's needed is a profound reorganization of our way of life, not a squeeze-another-hour-for-"community" into the week....

How American culture influences worship
The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith; Alan Wolfe;Free Press: 310 pp., $26

By Bernadette Murphy, Special to The Times

Religion pervades American culture. "In God We Trust" is emblazoned on our money; "One nation, under God," we recite in the Pledge of Allegiance. In our history, religion played a role from the beginning. The United States was the first country in the world to write freedom of religion into its constitution, notes Alan Wolfe, sociologist and author of "The Transformation of American Religion," and whether we like it or not, we are considered one of the most religious nations in the West.

But if we examine how Americans practice their faith in daily life, Wolfe contends, we'll find not the fire-and-brimstone belief systems in which doctrine and theology informed our lives but domesticated, malleable faiths, more attuned to the surrounding secular culture than were the original tenets of our respective denominations. "[F]ar from living in a world elsewhere, the faithful in the United States are remarkably like everyone else," Wolfe writes in this sharp-eyed examination of how religion is practiced in American daily life....

...The lamenting tone in which Wolfe describes these changes may initially be misleading. There are drawbacks to these transformations, he points out; we have lost our religious zest and abandoned the high standards of those who preceded us. Yet his narrative makes clear that in many ways this is to the good. Over the last 40 years, for example, Americans have become adept at switching faiths. "As much as we may be tempted to denounce as flighty Americans who change their faith as often as their cars," he writes, "we ought to recognize that religious switching acts as a kind of insurance policy against bigotry. If you cannot be sure today what your faith will be tomorrow you had better not say anything too nasty about any of them."

Wolfe, who holds no specific religious convictions himself, shows readers — both believers and those who fear religion's power and its potential for fanaticism — the upside of this transformation, citing in particular our culture's extraordinary ability to embrace religious pluralism. Offering neither a cynical attack on religion nor a starry-eyed celebration of its triumphs, he presents a commendably balanced view, honoring the role of religion has played in our nation's past while helping us see more clearly the present state of religious affairs. The resulting portrait may run contrary to our national self-image, but it also lessens the gap between the high expectations many of us have for religion and the realities of ordinary people leading earthly lives.

Absurdistan in America
by Stephen Baskerville, PhD

In Iowa, the government has confiscated the savings of 11-year-old Rylan Nitzschke. Rylan saved $220 from chores and shoveling snow, but that now belongs to Iowa. Why? Rylan’s father allegedly owes child support (to Rylan), and his father’s name was on the boy’s bank account.

OK, so this is a mistake, and Iowa will return the boy’s savings, right? Wrong. State officials have no intention of returning the money. After all, they receive federal funds for each dollar they collect (and for each father they incarcerate). Rylan’s piggy bank helps balance the budget.

As Congress prepares to pass the Welfare Reform bill, the Washington Times reports that child support enforcement officials are ecstatic over provisions that will allow them to plunder and criminalize more citizens, using children as the justification. Yet no evidence indicates that there is, or ever has been, a problem of unpaid child support other than that created by the government. The child support "crisis" consists of little more than the government seizing people’s children, imposing patently impossible debts on parents (and others) who have done nothing to incur those debts, and then arresting those who, quite predictably, cannot pay....

How the Protection of Law Was Lost
by Paul Craig Roberts

The Enron era accounting scandals have resulted in new legislation, Sarbanes-Oxley, which imposes criminal liability on the CEO and CFO of corporations with incorrect accounting statements. This reform will have unintended consequences, as have previous reforms.

A case can be made that the recent scandals are themselves the consequences of past reforms. The emphasis on quarterly earnings is the result of reform that aimed to provide investors with more timely information about the profitability and financial condition of public companies. Stock options resulted from reforms that sought to tie executive compensation to shareholder return as measured by the company’s stock price. Another reform capped executive salaries at $1 million. Compensation above this amount must be paid from after-tax profits or justified by performance. The practice of giving executives large options whose value depends on driving up quarterly earnings (the measure of performance) came from this reform. In the early 1990s the S.E.C. itself launched fictional quarterly earnings reports when that agency changed Rule 16b. Previously, executives who exercised their stock options were required to purchase the stock at the option price and to hold it for six months before selling. The rule change permitted executives to sell the stock the minute they exercised their options, thus eliminating the executives’ exposure to the market.

Reform took its toll on the culture of accounting firms. In a judgmental era, loose dealings ruined reputations. Partners were paid according to seniority. The accounting industry operated under self-imposed bans on price competition and advertising. With charges that the absence of price competition was anticompetitive, the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice destroyed this accounting culture during the 1970s. Competition on the basis of reputation and probity was replaced with price competition. Partners ceased to be paid by seniority. Instead, they were paid according to the business they brought to their firms. Accounting firms began consulting with the corporations that they audited, adding conflict of interest ingredients to the more accommodating stance toward clients that price competition had forced upon accountants. Price competition brought pressure to make the client happy. The need to make the client happy undermined the independence of the auditors.

Reformers assume that rules can substitute for character, and they ignore the unintended incentives created by rule making. An accounting culture based on probity was replaced by one in which sharp practices are acceptable as long as they comply with SEC rules.

By making top executives criminally liable for material errors, regardless of whether fraud is intended, Sarbanes-Oxley violates two protective principles of our legal system: mens rea (no crime without intent) and actus rea (evidence of a criminal act). Violating these legal principles is a far greater offense than accounting fraud.

We often hear that "the rule of law" is an advantage we have over our competitors, but the rule of law has been replaced with the discretion of regulators and prosecutors. Today Americans draw prison sentences for unknowingly violating vague regulations, the meanings of which are interpreted by the regulatory police who enforce the regulations. Americans are indicted on the basis of novel interpretations of criminal liability created by the indictment. When felony was ruled by intent, legal certainty was required in order that people could be aware of acts that constituted criminal violations. Now that intent is no longer required, certainly in law has lost its relevance....

Tuesday, September 23, 2003

Bush to World: Drop Dead!
The president lays an egg at the U.N.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, September 23, 2003, at 2:23 PM PT

Has an American president ever delivered such a bafflingly impertinent speech before the General Assembly as the one George W. Bush gave this morning?

Here were the world's foreign ministers and heads of state, anxiously awaiting some sign of an American concession to realism - even the sketchiest outline of a plan to share not just the burden but the power of postwar occupation in Iraq. And Bush gave them nothing, in some ways less than nothing.

In the few seconds he devoted to that subject, he cited only three areas in which the role of the United Nations (or any other nations) should be expanded: writing an Iraqi constitution, training a new corps of civil servants, and supervising elections. None of these notions is new.

Otherwise, Bush's message can be summarized as follows: The U.S.-led occupation authority is doing good work in Iraq; you should come help us; if you don't, you're on the side of the terrorists....

Aquarius: (Jan. 20-Feb. 18)
You don't mind having a girlfriend who likes to talk after sex, but the collect-call charges are really starting to add up.

PRESIDENT BUSH'S EVEN-TEMPERED RESPONSE TO EGREGIOUSLY SLANDEROUS IRAQ CRITICISM FROM SENATOR TED "PINKO HOOKER MURDERER" KENNEDY

Press Briefing by the President

THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon. Though I usually make it a point not to sully the sanctity of the Lord's Day by addressing the press, today I'm pulling myself away from my sixteen-hour DirecTV® NFL Sunday TicketTM to briefly make an exception. You see, late last week Senator Ted Kennedy – that gasping pigbeast king of the liberals – launched a vicious and baseless attack against yours truly. And while I won't validate his traitorous remarks by repeating them, suffice it say that Ted has dared to suggest that my facts-free fixation on toppling Saddam Hussein had anything to do with anything other than... um... like, you know, that whole "freedom" thingy people seem to clap for whenever my speech writers have me talk about it every ten minutes....

Christian Zionism: Dispensationalism And The Roots Of Sectarian Theology
A History of Dispensational Approaches

By John Scott:

Dispensationalism is one of the most influential theological systems within the universal church today. Largely unrecognised and subliminal, it has increasingly shaped the presuppositions of fundamentalist, evangelical, Pentecostal and charismatic thinking concerning Israel and Palestine over the past one hundred and fifty years.

John Nelson Darby is regarded as the father of dispensationalism and its prodigy, Christian Zionism. It was Cyrus. I. Scofield and D. L. Moody, however, who brought Darby’s sectarian theology into mainstream evangelical circles. R. C. Sproul concedes that dispensationalism is now ‘...a theological system that in all probability is the majority report among current American evangelicals.

Most of the early popular American radio preachers such as Donald Grey Barnhouse, Charles E. Fuller, and M. R. DeHaan were dispensationalists. Today, virtually all the 'televangelists' such as Jerry Falwell, Jim Bakker, Paul Crouch, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart and Billy Graham are also dispensationalists....

...Dispensationalism is based on the hermeneutical principle that Scripture is always to be interpreted literally. Darby’s approach might be summarised in one sentence in which he admitted, ‘I prefer quoting many passages than enlarging upon them.’ Scofield, who popularised and synthesised Darby's theology explains further,

Not one instance exists of a 'spiritual' or figurative fulfilment of prophecy... Jerusalem is always Jerusalem, Israel is always Israel, Zion is always Zion... Prophecies may never be spiritualised, but are always literal....

...Based on this interpretative principle, dispensationalists hold that the promises made to Abraham and through him to the Jews, although postponed during this present Church age, are nevertheless eternal and unconditional and therefore await future realisation since they have never yet been literally fulfilled. So, for example, it is an article of normative dispensational belief that the boundaries of the land promised to Abraham and his descendants from the Nile to the Euphrates will be literally instituted and that Jesus Christ will return to a literal and theocratic Jewish kingdom centred on a rebuilt temple in Jerusalem. In such a scheme the Church on earth is relegated to the status of a parenthesis...

... Clearly, the consequences of such views, whether promulgated by academics from respectable theological institutions like Dallas Theological Seminary and the Moody Bible Institute, or by Jewish fanatics such as Baruch Ben-Yosef and the Temple Mount Yeshiva, can only be devastating, especially since dispensationalists have considerable political influence through which they seek the fulfilment of their apocalyptic vision of the future. That dispensational vision is comparatively young in terms of church history. It began in 1828 when Darby wrote his first tract against the prevailing optimism of the established church....

...Whether intentionally or otherwise, dispensationalism is being used today to give theological justification to what the United Nations regards as racism and the denial of basic human rights; supporting the ethnic-cleansing of Palestinians from their historic lands; endorsing the building of Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories; inciting religious fanaticism by supporting the rebuilding of a Jewish Temple on Mount Moriah; dismissing moderate Jewish opinion willing to negotiate land for peace; and advocating an apocalyptic eschatology likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It is therefore not surprising that among the indigenous Christians of the Holy Land especially, dispensationalism is regarded as a dangerous heresy, an unwelcome and alien intrusion, advocating an exclusive Jewish political agenda and undermining the genuine ministry of justice, peace and reconciliation in the Middle East.

Christians Hail Rightist's Call To Oust Arabs

WASHINGTON — Thousands of Evangelical Christians waving Israeli flags cheered last week as Knesset member Benny Elon called for the "relocation" of Palestinians from the West Bank into Jordan.

The enthusiastic crowd at the annual convention of the Christian Coalition in Washington also cheered House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, who urged activists to back pro-Israel candidates who "stand unashamedly for Jesus Christ."

Elon, whose Moledet Party advocates the "transfer" of Palestinians to Arab countries,said that a "resettlement" of the Palestinians is prescribed by the Bible....

...The most significant characteristic of this year's Christian Coalition convention was the attempt to graft foreign-policy issues onto the organization's traditional domestic conservative agenda. That fusion of a conservative domestic platform and a hawkish foreign policy agenda was well expressed in the introductory statement of Roberta Combs, national president of the Christian Coalition.

"Our Road to Victory conference will be the largest pro-family event in America, as Christians will don armor for the war on terrorism," Combs said. "We will call on America to safeguard our institutions by returning to the true teachings of the Bible. We will pray for reform of our nation's soul by casting aside abortion, pornography, drugs and other manifestations of moral decline... we set out an agenda to affect social change in America, and want to let the terrorists know that they will not win."

Administration Case for War?
by Alan Bock
The most plausible reason I could come up with for the curious dance of denial by top administration officials regarding a direct connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terrorist attacks is that it was a short-term political effort to defuse Vice President Cheney's rather extravagant and over-the-top assertions Sunday before last on "Meet the Press." Here's how it seems to have played out.

Mr. Cheney went a little far in pressing the case that Saddam was a major sponsor of terrorism or a crony of al-Qaida, and the pols feared another uranium-yellowcake controversy at a time when Bush's ranking in the polls was already declining. ...

...on September 25, 2002, President Bush said, "Al Qaida hides, Saddam doesn't, but the danger is that they work in concert. The danger is that al Qaida becomes an extension of Saddam's madness and his hatred and his capacity to extend weapons of mass destruction around the world ... You can't distinguish between al Qaida and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror."

This spin was immediately respun by White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, who said the next day that the president was talking about what he feared might happen rather than what he thought had already happened. But it was followed by more blurring from various officials. As syndicated columnist Tom Teepen put it, "administration officials spent months suggesting that Saddam was implicated, regularly speaking of him while denouncing the terrorism and raising fears of more, clearly implying a link. And when braced directly on the issue, some – following Vice President Dick Cheney's lead – would pull a sly face and suggest that to say more would compromise intelligence sources."...

Monday, September 22, 2003

Java is the SUV of programming tools

...A project done in Java will cost 5 times as much, take twice as long, and be harder to maintain than a project done in a scripting language such as PHP or Perl. People who are serious about getting the job done on time and under budget will use tools such as Visual Basic (controlled all the machines that decoded the human genome). But the programmers and managers using Java will feel good about themselves because they are using a tool that, in theory, has a lot of power for handling problems of tremendous complexity. Just like the suburbanite who drives his SUV to the 7-11 on a paved road but feels good because in theory he could climb a 45-degree dirt slope. If a programmer is attacking a truly difficult problem he or she will generally have to use a language with systems programming and dynamic type extension capability, such as Lisp. This corresponds to the situation in which my friend, the proud owner of an original-style Hummer, got stuck in the sand on his first off-road excursion; an SUV can't handle a true off-road adventure for which a tracked vehicle is required....

The Fastest Man on Earth
Why Everything You Know About Murphy’s Law is Wrong

by Nick T. Spark
whatcangowrongwill@yahoo.com
www.Regulus-Missile.com and www.eyeballoverload.com
Los Angeles, California

I have become the world’s leading expert on Murphy’s Law. No really, I’m serious. You doubtless have heard the Law: Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. To some it is a profound statement of philosophy, a reminder that life can be defined just as much by its inherent challenges as anything else. To others however the Law is a pessimistic comment that underscores, albeit in more elegant terms, that shit happens.

Whatever you might think about Murphy’s Law, one thing is certain: it is as ubiquitous an expression as there is in American English. Over the years it has been cited in thousands of articles, websites and news reports, been the subject of several books, appeared as the title of at least one bad Charles Bronson movie and a TV show, and inspired about a dozen zillion corollary Laws. Just about every time something goes wrong somewhere, the Law gets its two cents in. Fortunately my expertise owes very little to actual adversity — I’m not writing this from a hospital bed — and almost everything to research. Historical research. Which is to say I have become the expert on the origins of Murphy’s Law. This happened by accident…and if I’d known what the consequences would be of sticking my nose into it — how I’d draw the wrath of Chuck Yeager, get caught in the middle of a nasty 20-year feud, and nearly wind up in a hospital bed — I probably wouldn’t have bothered....

Study: Most high school grads don't have what it takes for college
Only 32% of 18-year-olds met criteria for readiness; minorities fared worst

By Greg Toppo
USA TODAY

Only one in three 18-year-olds are even minimally prepared for the rigors of college, a provocative new study suggests, and it paints an even bleaker picture of minority students' literacy, achievement and high school graduation rates.

The study, released today by the Manhattan Institute, says only 32% of students in the high school class of 2001 had what it took to be admitted to college or succeed there....

E.T. and God
Could earthly religions survive the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe?

by Paul Davies

... Suppose, then, that E.T. is far ahead of us not only scientifically and technologically but spiritually, too. Where does that leave mankind's presumed special relationship with God? This conundrum poses a particular difficulty for Christians, because of the unique nature of the Incarnation. Of all the world's major religions, Christianity is the most species-specific. Jesus Christ was humanity's savior and redeemer. He did not die for the dolphins or the gorillas, and certainly not for the proverbial little green men. But what of deeply spiritual aliens? Are they not to be saved? Can we contemplate a universe that contains perhaps a trillion worlds of saintly beings, but in which the only beings eligible for salvation inhabit a planet where murder, rape, and other evils remain rife?

Those few Christian theologians who have addressed this thorny issue divide into two camps. Some posit multiple incarnations and even multiple crucifixions—God taking on little green flesh to save little green men, as a prominent Anglican minister once told me. But most are appalled by this idea or find it ludicrous. After all, in the Christian view of the world, Jesus was God's only son. Would God have the same person born, killed, and resurrected in endless succession on planet after planet? This scenario was lampooned as long ago as 1794, by Thomas Paine. "The Son of God," he wrote in The Age of Reason , "and sometimes God himself, would have nothing else to do than to travel from world to world, in an endless succession of death, with scarcely a momentary interval of life." Paine went on to argue that Christianity was simply incompatible with the existence of extraterrestrial beings, writing, "He who thinks he believes in both has thought but little of either."

Catholics tend to regard the idea of multiple incarnations as verging on heresy, not because of its somewhat comic aspect but because it would seem to automate an act that is supposed to be God's singular gift. "God chose a very specific way to redeem human beings," writes George Coyne, a Jesuit priest and the director of the Vatican Observatory , whose own research includes astrobiology. "He sent his only son, Jesus, to them, and Jesus gave up his life so that human beings would be saved from their sin. Did God do this for extraterrestrials? ... The theological implications about God are getting ever more serious."

Paul Tillich, one of the few prominent Protestant theologians to give serious consideration to the issue of alien beings, took a more positive view. "Man cannot claim to occupy the only possible place for incarnation," he wrote. The Lutheran theologian Ted Peters, of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences , in Berkeley, California, has made a special study of the impact on religious faith of belief in extraterrestrials. In discussing the tradition of debate on this topic, he writes, "Christian theologians have routinely found ways to address the issue of Jesus Christ as God incarnate and to conceive of God's creative power and saving power exerted in other worlds." Peters believes that Christianity is robust enough and flexible enough to accommodate the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, or ETI. One theologian who is emphatically not afraid of that challenge is Robert Russell, also of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences. "As we await 'first contact,'" he has written, "pursuing these kinds of questions and reflections will be immensely valuable."...

An Historical What-If

So anti-war libertarians generally believe that it was our involvement in Gulf War I that pissed Osama bin Laden off enough to make us the object of his ire (we had been quasi-allies with him, after all, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan). It was American troops in the Muslim holy land that made us the focus of his anger.

Most libertarains opposed Gulf War I, under the theory that it wasn't in our national security interest. The typical consevative, pro-war response to this is that beyond Kuwait, Saddam had his eye on Saudi Arabia. And if we hadn't intervened, he may have invaded his way to a significant share of the world oil market.

The libertarian response to this is "so what?" Merely controlling a significant share of the world's oil supply means nothing. Sitting on oil bestows no power whatsoever. It isn't until you sell the oil that you begin to accumulate the spoils of owning it. And so Saddam would still have no choice but to sell oil to the United States for the simple fact that we are the world's biggest consumer of oil -- there's no benefit in refusing to sell to us.

But I think you can take this a step further.

Not only would Saddam's invasion (and, for the sake of argument, let's say conquer) of Saudi Arabia have not presented a crisis for the United States, it may have presented an opportunity. Several, actually.

Up until 1990 or so, Saddam Hussein was, for all intents and purposes, an ally....

...If we had stayed out of Gulf War I, and the predictions of Saddam's invasion of Saudi Arabia proved accurate, we would today be dealing with a brutal dictator with whom we enjoy nominally friendly relations -- really not all that different than our current relationship with the Saudis. And given that Saddam was a secularist ruler, we'd probably have that relationship minus the Wahabbist fundamentalism we have to put up with with the current Saudi regime.

How we trained al-Qa’eda

For all the millions of words written about al-Qa’eda since the 9/11 attacks two years ago, one phenomenon is consistently overlooked — the role of the Bosnian war in transforming the mujahedin of the 1980s into the roving Islamic terrorists of today.

Many writers and reporters have traced al-Qa’eda and other terror groups’ origins back to the Afghan war of 1979–1992, that last gasp of the Cold War when US-backed mujahedin forces fought against the invading Soviet army. It is well documented that America played a major role in creating and sustaining the mujahedin, which included Osama bin Laden’s Office of Services set up to recruit volunteers from overseas. Between 1985 and 1992, US officials estimate that 12,500 foreign fighters were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and guerrilla warfare tactics in Afghan camps that the CIA helped to set up.

Yet America’s role in backing the mujahedin a second time in the early and mid-1990s is seldom mentioned — largely because very few people know about it, and those who do find it prudent to pretend that it never happened. Following the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 and the collapse of their puppet regime in 1992, the Afghan mujahedin became less important to the United States; many Arabs, in the words of the journalist James Buchan, were left stranded in Afghanistan ‘with a taste for fighting but no cause’. It was not long before some were provided with a new cause. From 1992 to 1995, the Pentagon assisted with the movement of thousands of mujahedin and other Islamic elements from Central Asia into Europe, to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs.

The Bosnia venture appears to have been very important to the rise of mujahedin forces, to the emergence of today’s cross-border Islamic terrorists who think nothing of moving from state to state in the search of outlets for their jihadist mission. In moving to Bosnia, Islamic fighters were transported from the ghettos of Afghanistan and the Middle East into Europe; from an outdated battleground of the Cold War to the major world conflict of the day; from being yesterday’s men to fighting alongside the West’s favoured side in the clash of the Balkans. If Western intervention in Afghanistan created the mujahedin, Western intervention in Bosnia appears to have globalised it. ...

...The Pentagon’s secret alliance with Islamic elements allowed mujahedin fighters to be ‘flown in’, though they were initially reserved as shock troops for particularly hazardous operations against Serb forces. According to a report in the Los Angeles Times in October 2001, from 1992 as many as 4,000 volunteers from the Middle East, North Africa and Europe, ‘known as the mujahedin’, arrived in Bosnia to fight with the Muslims. Richard Holbrooke, America’s former chief Balkans peace negotiator, has said that the Bosnian Muslims ‘wouldn’t have survived’ without the help of the mujahedin, though he later admitted that the arrival of the mujahedin was a ‘pact with the devil’ from which Bosnia is still recovering....

Account Balance
Can the government really ensure "corporate accountability"?
Tim Cavanaugh

But at the corporate level, there is more than accountability. There is a robust form of rough justice for misbehaving companies. Corporations already receive the "death penalty" with no law enforcement needed. Villains of recent years -- including Enron, Tyco, ImClone, Global Crossing, and even venerable Arthur Andersen -- are all finished or at death's door. WorldCom, renamed "MCI" in an unsuccessful bid to escape the stench of its past, is struggling in a harsh telecom market. Even Union Carbide, a legendary corporate knave, no longer exists; the company was absorbed two years ago by Dow Chemical, which itself is now targeted by anti-Carbide activists.

Do I believe Union Carbide paid a steep enough price for the 8,000 people who died due to the company's negligence in Bhopal, India? I do not. But at least the company isn't around anymore. If only the same could be said for misbehaving agencies of the state -- the same state that activists would charge with enforcing accountability on private corporations....

...If that's not enough, put this in your Superfund site and dispose of it: The federal government is by far the largest environmental polluter in the country, out-dumping any private company.

If any private corporation had engaged in such patterns of malfeasance, fraud, and megabuck sleight of hand, it would have been punished by its customers, shareholders and employees long before the government got involved. This doesn't mean the market is a perfect or even reliable mechanism for regulating bad behavior. But it does suggest that before we give the job of promoting organizational accountability to the least accountable organization of all, we might remember the line about the fox and the henhouse.

It Seemed Like a Good Idea...
By DHinMI

Karl Rove thought imposing tariffs on steel was the perfect wedge issue—he just never realized that the electoral coalition it would drive a wedge through would be his own.

In 2002 George W. Bush ordered tariffs on steel imported from overseas. Russia, China, Brazil and other developing nations were being accused of dumping steel on American markets., and despite raising their productivity by shifting production from the obsolescent big mills to efficient mini-mills, domestic producers still couldn’t compete against the cheaper foreign steel. Bush touted the tariffs as a tool to protect American jobs from unfair competition—he was conveniently silent about price supports to American farmers—but it was really nothing more than policy dilettante Karl Rove’s gambit to hold Republican votes in West Virginia and Ohio and gain a few more in Pennsylvania.

Rove was surely pleased with himself for securing a policy meant to lure union voters in steel-producing states. Too bad for him that he didn’t consider how this “socialization of conflict” was not likley to divide labor unions but was likley to expose rifts between steel producers and manufacturers, thus undermining Rove’s reelection strategy of milking big dollars from small manufacturers and big votes in the industrial Midwest.

Over forty years ago the political scientist E. E. Schattschneider described the process by which private competition between business or pressure groups draws the public into the “socialization of conflict.” “One of the characteristic points of origin of pressure politics,” wrote Schattschneider, “is a breakdown of the discipline of the business community… It is the losers in intra-business conflict who seek redress from public authority. The dominant business interests resist appeals to the government.” Seen in this light, it is natural for steel producers to band together to secure government protection from their lower-charging competitors. But it is just as natural for steel consumers to fight a government policy that bumps up their production costs—the reaction that Karl Rove expected from Brazilians, Russians, Chinese and Europeans, but which he never anticipated from Republicans in Grand Rapids and Nashville....

A Bribe By Any Other Name
UPI reported Friday that Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was scheduled to meet with U.S. President George W. Bush next week on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York to sign a slew of high-tech cooperation deals between the two countries.

Diplomatic sources told UPI the deals may be part of U.S. efforts to offer India incentives to soften its opposition to sending troops to Iraq.....

VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: The ever-expanding Patriot Act

Critics warned the expanded police powers authorized by the so-called Patriot Act -- ratified just weeks after the terror attacks of Sept. 11 -- would soon be used by opportunistic cops and prosecutors in areas far afield from any threat of al-Qaida-style terrorism.

Nonsense, supporters replied. New government powers to read every e-mail passing through an Internet Service Provider; to conduct roving wiretaps without informing their victims; to snoop on our book buying and library borrowing habits; to secretly rake through our private financial data; to "enhance" criminal sentences till they stretch for decades ... would be used only when necessary to prevent for "another Sept. 11."

Guess what.

"Within six months of passing the Patriot Act, the Justice Department was conducting seminars on how to stretch the new wiretapping provisions to extend them beyond terror cases," reports Dan Dodson, a spokesman for the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys. "They say they want the Patriot Act to fight terrorism; then, within six months, they are teaching their people how to use it on ordinary citizens."

Well ... so what? If some moron in California finds himself charged with "terrorism using a weapon of mass destruction" when he wounds himself because his pipe bomb exploded in his lap, if a North Carolina prosecutor charges the proprietor of a methamphetamine lab with breaking a new state law against "manufacture of chemical weapons," hoping to send him up for 12 years to life instead of the standard six months ... they're all criminals, right? Who should shed a tear if the authorities now have new tools to use against them?

Except that:

• In the June 27 edition of "The Nation," Jonah Engle reports, "Speaking at a conference this winter on Internet crime, eBay.com's director of law enforcement and compliance, Joseph Sullivan, offered law-enforcement officials extensive access to personal customer information," all, Mr. Sullivan helpfully offered, "without having to produce a court order."

Why this sudden spirit of cooperation?

"September 11th changed things dramatically," Nimrod Kozlovski of Yale's Information Society Project told The Nation. "EBay has itself felt the sting of tough new laws: On March 28 its PayPal unit was charged by the Justice Department with violating the Patriot Act for providing money transfer services to gambling companies. ... In this political climate, being pliant to law enforcement may be sound business. ..."...

Bush’s Iraqi Smoke
by Sheldon Richman, September 19, 2003

The Bush administration long ago set the record for misleading the American people. Compared to President George W. Bush and his minions, Bill Clinton was an amateur.

And don’t think that’s a small achievement. It isn’t easy to choose words that will both deceive and allow the speaker to claim later that he did not lie. That takes talent.

......It is an utter falsehood to assert that the president never led the American people to believe that Iraq was involved in 9/11. All right, he never said: "Saddam Hussein plotted with Osama bin Laden to attack the World Trade Center and Pentagon."

But he did say, on declaring an end to major combat in Iraq last May, "Terrorists declared war on the United States, and war is what they got."

Ponder that for a moment. Bush had just sent the armed forces into Iraq to depose its government and to establish American control of the country. On declaring victory he uttered words that could have no other intent than to directly tie Hussein to the 9/11 attacks. What else could that sentence mean? Hussein personally did not issue a declaration of war against the United States. His armed forces did not attack Americans before the invasion. He was a brutal totalitarian dictator, but he was not a terrorist by the conventional definition. On the other hand, bin Laden did declare war on the United States, and al Qaeda personnel flew airplanes into three buildings on U.S. soil.

Thus when Bush said, just as the formal war on Iraq ended, that "terrorists declared war on the United States, and war is what they got," it could have meant only one thing: Saddam Hussein was an accomplice in the al Qaeda 9/11 operation. And 70 percent of the American people believed him.

But now the president says Hussein was not involved. In other words, never mind....

The Plant Protection Racket
By Thomas R. DeGregori

Inferiority as a Luxury Item

Before the Industrial Revolution, artists and artisans would strive to make a work as perfect as possible. They used the technologies of their time to make as fine a product as their skill and limited technology allowed. Given the long painstaking efforts involved in creation, such items were few in number and available to only a minuscule number of elites. They were the crowning achievement of their time and brought great prestige to those fortunate few who owned them. Renaissance painters used the mathematics of perspective to create their trompe l'oeil (a French term meaning "trick the eye.") David Hockney's recent claim that some of the Renaissance artists achieved realism by using a camera obscura to design their paintings is controversial and shocking to many today but one wonders whether it would have mattered to anyone prior to the Industrial Revolution (Hockney 2001).

With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, one of the qualities that allegedly makes a craft item superior became its demonstrable inferiority....

...No previous transformation was as beneficial to human enterprise and creativity as the Industrial Revolution. Yet it was damned for being dehumanizing, and its technology was considered antithetical to artistic endeavors. The dualism between thought and practical action that characterized earlier civilizations such as that of classical Greece was revived with a vengeance. It is more than appropriate that among the anti-technology artists and artisans, there was a revival of Greek forms in neoclassicism. William Blake, who is famous for his reference to "dark Satanic Mills," was himself "dependent upon prosperous patrons for his livelihood" (Boime 1985, 111). The "fiery chariots," the furnaces, and other technologies were important images in Blake's poetry and drawings, reflecting more of an ambivalence to industrialization than is recognized by many who quote him. The neoclassicism in fine arts that followed Blake and the revival of Greek ideals were facilitated by "one of the first and most refined products of modern manufacture ... the steel pen, which everyday recorded the images, means, and ideas of the new era" (Howard 1985, 790-2). Steel pens were better and they were cheaper (Howard 1985, 794).

By the late 19th century, the elitist mania for handcrafted items led to an interest in "primitive" art which pre-Industrial European elites would have considered too crude to be art....

...As societies become more affluent and wages rise, hand made products become more expensive, sometimes prohibitively so. Even reaching out for overseas production in low wage countries is not always effective as these areas are seeking to improve their lot with low cost industrial production serving a mass global market. Affluence also creates an ever-growing class of well-off consumers, many of whom seek to emulate the crudities of consumption of the elites. The crude items of every day use that were the few meager processions of the poor have become the prestige consumption of the affluent. To acquire the "authentic" or "natural" or "real," be it in construction with expensive stone or wood or in foods, eating only the rare or organically grown - these natural lifestyles are expensive because the means for providing them are extremely limited, making it a way of life possible only for a privileged portion of the world's population. Time magazine had a cover story on "The Simple Life." A perceptive correspondent for The New Yorker made an "unofficial tally of Time's ‘expensive, high tech and sophisticated’ stuff, as against the new simplicity's ‘recyclable, cheap, plain and nostalgic’ stuff." The results were:

‘Recyclable, cheap, plain and nostalgic’ goods ... : $459.40.
‘Expensive, high tech and sophisticated’ equivalents: $145.83.

He concluded that he didn't think that he could "afford the simple life (The New Yorker 1991, 30, and Time 1991, see also Carlson 2000).

It seems that the poor can no longer afford the crudities that were once their lot in life and have to make do with the products of industry when they can afford any consumption at all. Even the poverty of Gandhi was costly, as his trademark goats had to be boarded when he was in urban areas, prompting the often-paraphrased comment of Edgar Snow that Ghandi never realized how much it cost the Indian rich to keep him in his poverty.

Consumption of inferior products has become a growth industry in affluent societies particularly in the area of food and health where the fetish of ‘inferior is better, safer and healthier’ has deep ideological roots. Terms like "organic," "biodynamic," "all natural," "alternative therapies," "herbal" and "holistic" have lost any meaning that they may once have had and are to be understood as endowing a commodity with immeasurable, not fully definable vital properties. The quintessential inferior vitalist product is the homeopathic remedy whose mystic vitalist potency is derived from having virtually every last molecule of the "medication" diluted away....

...In addition to higher levels of nutrition and cleaner, safer food, modern consumers now have an incredible array of foodstuffs from around the world as well as an opportunity to savor, with some frequency, cuisines from cultures whose culinary delights were unknown to their parents or grandparents. In an article appropriately titled, "Mean Cuisine," Greg Critser asks the question, "Why, in a time of unprecedented abundance for everyone--vine-ripened Mexican tomatoes for $1 a pound! World-class reds and whites from Montepulciano d'Abruzzo for $5 a bottle! An international glut of inexpensive extra virgin olive oils and cheeses and nuts and fruits at Trader Joe's and Price Club! - why oh why are the chefs of America so dour, so chary - so very very very bummed out?" (Critser 2001). "Why the big change" Critser asks? "Ten years ago, a pint of cold-pressed, extra-virgin Italian olive oil would set you back about $20. It was scarce, and so it was the chef's preference. Today one can buy a gallon for the same price. Today, of course, imported oil is not the chef's choice" (Critser 2001). The answer is abundance, and abundance is a threat to the values of snobbery of the critics of modernity.

Critser adds that the "culprit is globalization." The foods, particularly, those that were once imported at a price beyond the reach of ordinary citizens, have now become common and relatively cheap in supermarkets across the land. Globalization has been the mechanism by which the increasing global food production leads to greater diversity of available foodstuffs and therefore greater choice, but it also deprives the snobs of that sense of exclusivity in the items they consume. In a world of increasing free trade and technological advancement, the food snobs seek to pursue an anti-trade ("buy locally"), anti-technology agenda in order to preserve their status and self-esteem, even if it is at the expense of continuing the increase in food production to meet a growing world population and make the technologies of accessibility and abundance available to those who have not had the opportunity to benefit as fully as others from them. Rules that make items of consumption more expensive, restrict access to them to those who can afford them, thus making them more prestigious. Whatever the rhetoric used to defend them may be, the fact remains that those actively opposing the advance of science and technology are also working against the well-being of the less fortunate citizens of this planet. Humanism and science are today, as in the past, intricately interrelated in the endeavor not only to understand the world but also to make it a better place for all who call it home.

DESPERATE SADDAM OFFERS AMERICANS DEAL

From Paul Martin In Baghdad

SADDAM Hussein has been in secret negotiations with US forces in Iraq for the past nine days, we can reveal.

The Iraqi dictator is demanding safe passage to the former Soviet republic of Belarus. In exchange, he has vowed to provide information on weapons of mass destruction and disclose bank accounts where he siphoned off tens of millions of dollars in plundered cash....

The Terrorism Link That Wasn't
On Wednesday, President Bush finally got around to acknowledging that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

White House aides will tell you that Mr. Bush never made that charge directly. And that is so. But polls show that lots of Americans believe in the link. That is at least in part because the president's aides have left the implication burning.

President Bush himself drew a dotted line from the 9/11 attack in declaring the end of hostilities in Iraq. "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on Sept. 11, 2001, and still goes on," Mr. Bush said. He continued the theme in his last major speech on the war....

Sunday, September 21, 2003

“Killing You is a Very Easy Thing For Us”: Human Rights Abuses in Southeast Afghanistan

...Afghanistan’s window of opportunity is closing fast. A new constitution and national elections are on the horizon, and warlords and abusive military commanders are becoming more and more entrenched. The international community and the Afghan Transitional Administration must act soon to improve the human rights situation. After the elections, scheduled for June 2004, it may be too late.

This report, based on research conducted from January through June 2003, documents human rights abuses in the southeast of Afghanistan, the most densely populated part of Afghanistan. If allowed to continue with impunity, these abuses will make it impossible for Afghans to create a modern, democratic state. Although many observers have noted the harmful effects of chronic insecurity in Afghanistan, few have sufficiently appreciated the extent to which continuing insecurity, at its heart, is due to policies and depredations of local government actors. Human Rights Watch found evidence of government involvement or complicity in abuses in virtually every district in the southeast. These include the provinces of Kabul, Wardak, Ghazni, Logar, Paktia, Paktika, Laghman, Nangarhar, Kapisa, and Kunar.

The three main types of abuse documented in this report are violent criminal offenses—armed robbery, extortion, and kidnappings—committed by army troops, police, and intelligence agents; governmental attacks on media and political actors; and violations of the human rights of women and girls. Many of these violations are preventable, but solutions will require the concerted attention and action of international and Afghan authorities alike, which to date has not been sufficiently forthcoming....

Occasional Missionaries; Accidental Tourists

...Several years ago, one of my closest friends went to England with his family to hand out the Jesus Video to Muslims. It's his story, not mine, so I won't tell it. It was, in short, a bad experience. From top to bottom. I could tell that a real interest and enthusiasm had been drowned in the realities of a flawed project designed to involve Americans in missions. I doubt that my friend would ever undertake this again.

But then, in all honesty, was taking videos to England, at the cost of thousands of dollars, really the best way for my friend to support missions to Muslims in England or elsewhere? Was taking his family to England the best way for him to be excited and involved? I believe that supporting existing work with the funding he devoted to the trip, financing more translations of the Jesus movie, being involved in spreading the word about this ministry to millions would be more appropriate. I believe that, in hindsight, he would probably agree.

Our current mindset, however, is that the "mission trip experience" should be for my friend and his family. They will get such a blessing. He will get so much out of it. And he did, but not what I believe he expected or intended. I believe such experiences could easily be multiplied, and it would be increasingly obvious that the cause of missions is not served very well by large numbers of short term mission trips often primarily justified by their effects on the missionary and the sending church. The cause would be significantly furthered by a higher level of missions awareness, more targeted support, linking up resources with needs, and a greater understanding of how to encourage and rejoice in church planting and church growth movements around the world.

I believe missions is a key part of a Christian's discipleship in this world, especially for American Christians living in such a blessed land and time. Short term trips can be part of that discipleship, but perhaps there are many ways to follow Christ around the world without taking money that could build churches and support local pastors and sending it to the airlines.

Friday, September 19, 2003

Confronting Prison Rape
By Wendy McElroy

A bright light is about to be shone on an almost unseen social problem: prison rape. ...

According to Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), on December 31, 2002, there were 2,033,331 people incarcerated in the United States. (Approximately 7% of those in State and Federal prisons are female.)

The US prison population is rising. In 1980, there were just over half a million inmates. The BJS estimates that, "If incarceration rates remain unchanged, 6.6% of U.S. residents born in 2001 will go to prison during their lifetime." (Other sources place that figure higher.) The chances are that someone you personally know -- and, perhaps, care about -- will become a prisoner.

Estimates on the rate of prison rape vary. In 2001, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a comprehensive report that estimated between 250,000 to and 600,000 prisoners, overwhelmingly male, are raped each year....

...And, yet, the question remains "why should you care?"

One reason: prisoners are human beings. Approximately half of those imprisoned today are "non-violent". Many have been arrested on drug charges or for comparatively minor offenses, such as being behind in child support payments.

The young and "unhardened" prisoners are the most vulnerable to rape. Consider Rodney Hulin. Arrested at 16 for setting fire to a dumpster, Hulin received an eight-year sentence. After being repeatedly raped and dismissed by prison authorities, he killed himself.

Most victims survive. But as Rep. Robert C. Scott (D-Va.) comments, "They leave prison much more likely to engage in crime than when they went in." Barrett Duke -- a VP of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission that lobbied for the Prison Rape Elimination Act -- adds, "The sexual brutalization of inmates exposes men and women to punishment that is not only cruel but that also severely impedes their opportunity to rehabilitate themselves to assume lives worthy of the dignity of their humanity."

More than dignity is involved. In 2000, about 25,000 inmates had HIV. The HIV rate in prison is at least four times that of the general public. A similar situation exists with other communicable diseases, like Hepatitis C (HCV), which can be spread through anal sex and has become the most common blood-borne infection in the U.S. According to the National Institute of Justice and the National Commission on Correctional Health Care, the rate of HCV infection in inmates is 9-10 times higher than in the general public.

You should care about prison rape if only for one reason: approximately 630,000 inmates were released from prison in 2002 and became the people beside whom you may now be living and working....

Wine-drinking women more fertile, study claims
COPENHAGEN (AFP) - Women who drink moderate quantities of wine become pregnant more easily than their teetotal or beer-supping sisters, a Danish medical review reported.

According to Dagens Medecin a study of 30,000 women showed that those who chose a glass of wine over beer or spirits were most likely to conceive. The least likely to become pregnant were those who drank no alcohol at all....

Thursday, September 18, 2003

Now and then

Now:
WASHINGTON - President Bush said Wednesday there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — disputing an impression that critics say the administration tried to foster to justify the war against Iraq.

"There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al-Qaida ties," the president said. But he also said, "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th."

Then:
Text of a Letter from the President to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate

March 18, 2003

Dear Mr. Speaker: (Dear Mr. President:)

Consistent with section 3(b) of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (Public Law 107-243), and based on information available to me, including that in the enclosed document, I determine that:

(1) reliance by the United States on further diplomatic and other peaceful means alone will neither (A) adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq nor (B) likely lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq; and

(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.

Sincerely,

GEORGE W. BUSH

Special K Street
The fantasy world of Washington meets the reality-based culture of Hollywood.
By Michael Kinsley
Posted Wednesday, September 17, 2003, at 8:42 AM PT

Microsoft, the company I work for, had almost no "Washington presence" (as it is euphemistically called) until just a few years ago. Like most other high-tech firms, Microsoft felt that it needed nothing from the government. Then lawsuits started raining down, and people started telling Microsoft it was naive. Rival companies were working hard to get the government on their side. Why should Microsoft refrain?

This made some sense. You live in the world as you find it, not as you wish it to be. It might be nice if the largest corporation in America (by some measures) could mind its own business and expect the government to do the same. But in reality, refusing to wallow like a reptile in the influence-trading swamp is almost a violation of a big company's fiduciary duty to its shareholders. Nice little software company you have here. Sure would be a pity if something legislative happened to it.

Naiveté was just the beginning of the indictment, though. The company was called arrogant: Who the hell do you think you are? Why should you be exempt from the tax that Washington's influence-peddling culture imposes on every other big corporation? Ultimately, there was even an implication that refusing to play the influence game was downright unpatriotic. Real American corporations hire lobbyists. They maintain big District of Columbia offices and throw lavish parties where Washington big shots can socialize with one another at the stockholders' expense. It's the American way! You got a problem with that, buddy?...

Big Brother is watching you 24/7
The roots of America's surveillance culture are deep - and ominous
By Brian Gilmore
As soon as possible, reread George Orwell's "1984." Then break your cellphone into small pieces, put the pieces in a paper bag, and burn it.

Some of us might take such actions after reading Christian Parenti's thought-provoking book, "The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America - From Slave Passes to the War on Terror."...

...Cellphones are just one example of how all of us are easily traced everyday through the convenience of modern technology. Credit cards, Internet accounts, gym memberships, library cards, health-insurance records, and workplace identification badges are some of the other routine technological conveniences that daily record our every move.

By closely examining chattel slavery in America, Parenti illustrates how this pattern began centuries ago. Using such measures as patrols and passes, America desperately tried to keep track of its many African slaves.

The creation of full-time police departments, starting in New York City in 1845, marked a further broadening of America's surveillance system. These police departments used finger-printing and photography to track criminals and, Parenti says, in the process laid the groundwork for our current system of mass observation.

The individual chapters of "The Soft Cage" focus on particular topics that could be books themselves. One of the best, "The Camera Land: Security Aesthetics and Public Space," discusses the proliferation of cameras that seem to watch all public spaces. Parenti notes that such an arrangement has a "corrosive effect upon democracy."

He also analyzes surveillance at work in the social-welfare system, and through the economy in which the proliferation of "digital cash" (debit and credit cards) has "caused an unplanned, unexamined extension of state power and social discipline."...

Wednesday, September 17, 2003

Superhero Frees Cars from the Clamp

Sept 17 (Reuters) - He wears a baby-blue spandex jumpsuit and shiny gold panties, gloves, cape, boots and goggles. He wields a giant, metal-cutting circular power saw.

Who is Angle Grinder Man?

He is Britain's self-styled "first wheel-clamp and speed camera vigilante cum subversive superhero philanthropist entertainer type person." That's who.

For those not familiar with industrial machine tools, an angle grinder is the saw best suited to cutting through plates of steel, such as, say, the wheel clamps that authorities use to immobilize illegally parked cars in London.

And Angle Grinder Man offers his "free clamp-removal service" to "all good, decent law-unabiding people" who would rather fight back than pay to have their cars released....

The Bible and Alcohol

...Our attitude toward alcohol may well be conditioned by our culture more than we realize. Since the days of Prohibition, many believers have simply assumed that partaking of alcoholic beverages was sinful. What is interesting is that in many other countries God-fearing Christians see no problem with alcoholic beverages. (When I was on sabbatical in England, for example, I heard the pastor at an evangelical church use an illustration which involved alcohol in a positive light. He was speaking about our attitude toward little disasters - such as when one brings home the groceries and the one sack that had the Sherry in it falls to the ground and the Sherry bottle breaks! The very casualness of this illustration put in bold relief the difference in attitude between many American Christians and many European Christians regarding alcoholic beverages. If a pastor in the States were to use the same illustration, most churches would censure him for it if not outright sack him.)...

...One of the hallmarks of modern American Christianity is its preoccupation with a "formula faith." Tremendously popular are conferences that address conflicts between parents and youth and how to resolve them. One well-known such conference turns (occasionally) good advice into hundreds of rules that can suffocate one's walk with God. We are enamored of the "How to" books that work for others and perhaps may work for us. All too often, once a person has found a tailor-made Bible-reading schedule, or a tailor-made pattern of prayer or diet or method of raising children or love-making technique, he writes a book about it and proclaims its universal applicability and even its normativeness. The reason such sells? Because legalism is endemic to human nature. We can package such as "practical Christianity" or "a wise and godly lifestyle" or "principles to live by," but at bottom when such advice goes beyond the scriptures and turns into more than advice, it is legalism. Such a preoccupation with legalism is seen in church membership requirements, missionary and pastoral ordination bodies, and Bible college/seminary codes of conduct. Take a look at a catalog of almost any evangelical institute of higher learning. You will notice that all too often the code of conduct section will spend an inordinate amount of space making grey areas taboo while spending almost no space articulating what the Bible declares to be sinful behavior.

Church historian M. James Sawyer recently spoke at the western regional meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society on Sola Scriptura in the Protestant tradition. In his lecture he noted the irony of the modern milieu:

Among contemporary denominations we find statements such as that of the [denomination's name withheld], who in their licensing and ordination questionnaire asks candidates if they agree that the Bible is the "only and infallible rule of faith and practice" for the believer. (The questionnaire on the very next line asks the candidate if he agrees to abstain from the use of alcohol in all forms.)

The point we are trying to make here is twofold: (1) Christians tend to compile rules and regulations that go beyond what is written; and (2) when such grey zones are considered evil, those who do not abide by such rules are often viewed as "the weaker brother." In reality, the weaker brother in scripture is the one who has too many scruples, not too few...

The Bible and Alcohol

...Our attitude toward alcohol may well be conditioned by our culture more than we realize. Since the days of Prohibition, many believers have simply assumed that partaking of alcoholic beverages was sinful. What is interesting is that in many other countries God-fearing Christians see no problem with alcoholic beverages. (When I was on sabbatical in England, for example, I heard the pastor at an evangelical church use an illustration which involved alcohol in a positive light. He was speaking about our attitude toward little disasters�such as when one brings home the groceries and the one sack that had the Sherry in it falls to the ground and the Sherry bottle breaks! The very casualness of this illustration put in bold relief the difference in attitude between many American Christians and many European Christians regarding alcoholic beverages. If a pastor in the States were to use the same illustration, most churches would censure him for it if not outright sack him.)...

...One of the hallmarks of modern American Christianity is its preoccupation with a �formula faith.� Tremendously popular are conferences that address conflicts between parents and youth and how to resolve them. One well-known such conference turns (occasionally) good advice into hundreds of rules that can suffocate one�s walk with God. We are enamored of the �How to� books that work for others and perhaps may work for us. All too often, once a person has found a tailor-made Bible-reading schedule, or a tailor-made pattern of prayer or diet or method of raising children or love-making technique, he writes a book about it and proclaims its universal applicability and even its normativeness. The reason such sells? Because legalism is endemic to human nature. We can package such as �practical Christianity� or �a wise and godly lifestyle� or �principles to live by,� but at bottom when such advice goes beyond the scriptures and turns into more than advice, it is legalism. Such a preoccupation with legalism is seen in church membership requirements, missionary and pastoral ordination bodies, and Bible college/seminary codes of conduct. Take a look at a catalog of almost any evangelical institute of higher learning. You will notice that all too often the code of conduct section will spend an inordinate amount of space making grey areas taboo while spending almost no space articulating what the Bible declares to be sinful behavior.

Church historian M. James Sawyer recently spoke at the western regional meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society on Sola Scriptura in the Protestant tradition. In his lecture he noted the irony of the modern milieu:

Among contemporary denominations we find statements such as that of the [denomination�s name withheld], who in their licensing and ordination questionnaire asks candidates if they agree that the Bible is the �only and infallible rule of faith and practice� for the believer. (The questionnaire on the very next line asks the candidate if he agrees to abstain from the use of alcohol in all forms.)

The point we are trying to make here is twofold: (1) Christians tend to compile rules and regulations that go beyond what is written; and (2) when such grey zones are considered evil, those who do not abide by such rules are often viewed as �the weaker brother.� In reality, the weaker brother in scripture is the one who has too many scruples, not too few...

The Bible and Alcohol

...Our attitude toward alcohol may well be conditioned by our culture more than we realize. Since the days of Prohibition, many believers have simply assumed that partaking of alcoholic beverages was sinful. What is interesting is that in many other countries God-fearing Christians see no problem with alcoholic beverages. (When I was on sabbatical in England, for example, I heard the pastor at an evangelical church use an illustration which involved alcohol in a positive light. He was speaking about our attitude toward little disasters—such as when one brings home the groceries and the one sack that had the Sherry in it falls to the ground and the Sherry bottle breaks! The very casualness of this illustration put in bold relief the difference in attitude between many American Christians and many European Christians regarding alcoholic beverages. If a pastor in the States were to use the same illustration, most churches would censure him for it if not outright sack him.)...

...One of the hallmarks of modern American Christianity is its preoccupation with a ‘formula faith.’ Tremendously popular are conferences that address conflicts between parents and youth and how to resolve them. One well-known such conference turns (occasionally) good advice into hundreds of rules that can suffocate one’s walk with God. We are enamored of the ‘How to’ books that work for others and perhaps may work for us. All too often, once a person has found a tailor-made Bible-reading schedule, or a tailor-made pattern of prayer or diet or method of raising children or love-making technique, he writes a book about it and proclaims its universal applicability and even its normativeness. The reason such sells? Because legalism is endemic to human nature. We can package such as ‘practical Christianity’ or ‘a wise and godly lifestyle’ or ‘principles to live by,’ but at bottom when such advice goes beyond the scriptures and turns into more than advice, it is legalism. Such a preoccupation with legalism is seen in church membership requirements, missionary and pastoral ordination bodies, and Bible college/seminary codes of conduct. Take a look at a catalog of almost any evangelical institute of higher learning. You will notice that all too often the code of conduct section will spend an inordinate amount of space making grey areas taboo while spending almost no space articulating what the Bible declares to be sinful behavior.

Church historian M. James Sawyer recently spoke at the western regional meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society on Sola Scriptura in the Protestant tradition. In his lecture he noted the irony of the modern milieu:

Among contemporary denominations we find statements such as that of the [denomination’s name withheld], who in their licensing and ordination questionnaire asks candidates if they agree that the Bible is the ‘only and infallible rule of faith and practice’ for the believer. (The questionnaire on the very next line asks the candidate if he agrees to abstain from the use of alcohol in all forms.)

The point we are trying to make here is twofold: (1) Christians tend to compile rules and regulations that go beyond what is written; and (2) when such grey zones are considered evil, those who do not abide by such rules are often viewed as ‘the weaker brother.’ In reality, the weaker brother in scripture is the one who has too many scruples, not too few...

Fun with fusion: Freshman's nuclear fusion reactor has USU physics faculty in awe
By Alan Edwards
Deseret Morning News

LOGAN — A widespread belief among physicists nowadays is that modern science requires squadrons of scientists and wildly expensive equipment.

Craig Wallace and Philo T. Farnsworth are putting the lie to all that.

Wallace, a baby-faced tennis player fresh out of Spanish Fork High School, had almost the entire physics faculty of Utah State University hovering (and arguing) over an apparatus he had cobbled together from parts salvaged from junk yards and charity drops.

The apparatus is nothing less than the sine qua non of modern science: a nuclear fusion reactor, based on the plans of Utah's own Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of television....

Tuesday, September 16, 2003

George W. Bush Means Nothing
Note to self: The demons of sour conservatism cannot touch anything that truly matters. Just FYI

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, August 1, 2003

You cannot reach me, Dubya....

There is so much more going on than you know. There is so much deeper understanding and wider knowledge and higher winking and you can't touch any of it. Do you know this? You need to know this.

You and your brethren are like this sticky toxic mist. You will burn off in the sun of awareness and orgasm and breath. This is what makes it so fun to watch, so magical and visceral, such a divine circus, a rich tragicomic pageant. Do you sense it?...

See, you cannot touch us. We are inured. You are merely hollow and sad and quickly, effortlessly forgettable the minute we step outside or get into bed with our lovers or laugh with friends or scream to the sky the lyrics to "Ballroom Blitz," always, always striving to taste the intense flavors of the collective dream state.

What, too vague? Too namby-pamby new-age tofu-licking pro-sex liberal? Too bad.

Because there is more meaning and content and depth and significance in a lover's moan and in a drop of wine and in a dog's wag than in anything you can conjure in your homophobic faux-cowboy Lynne Cheney-thick dream, honey. Get over yourself. We are on to you. We know you are made of nothing but spin and frantic gesticulations and scowls. Poke a finger into you and out pours only sawdust and sighs....

...We watch you spin and hype and rage and scrunch your face in intense bogus prayer aimed at your bitter and self-righteous and homophobic God as your testes wither and weep. Man, have you got gall.

Maybe this gives you the illusion of power and control. Maybe this makes you feel all phallic and handsome and virile as if your toupee isn't rank and askew and your slacks wrinkled and your children in rehab and your sexless wife popping Zoloft like M&Ms. Titter.

But here's the thing: You affect only the surface of things. You are like the little swarm of gnats you have to pass through on the path to the cool summer lake. You are the tainted oyster in the vast ocean of time and sex and love. You are a jagged pothole on the highway to hell and the broken step on the stairway to heaven. But you are not real. You give no light. You contribute nothing. Not where it matters.

But please, by all means, keep trying. Keep ripping away at the rich dense frantic fabric of this gorgeous inexplicable life. You represent all the dark threads, the ugliness and the tension and the low vibration and you are necessary to remind anyone who's paying attention of what to watch out for, what to methodically purge, what to use as easy leverage to vault forward.

Look. You cannot reach me. You are nowhere near. You have no true power and no true connection and have yet to make any sort of splash in the calm lake of open-thighed soul. But it's OK. We understand. After all, as the saying goes, the graveyards are full of indispensable men. And the divine only smiles, licks its lips, and shimmies on.

Jeevan Vasagar
Wednesday July 2, 2003
The Guardian

...The researchers also found that, contrary to widely held beliefs, there is a high level of legal gun ownership in continental Europe.

In Germany almost as many weapons are sold in relation to the population as in the US.

A million gun sales are reported each year by German citizens, roughly a quarter of the number of guns bought by civilians in the US, whose population is more than three times higher.

"Many, but not all, European countries already have a strong gun culture, while Germany has a long tradition of private firearm ownership and limited regulation," said Aaron Karp, one of the authors.

France is unusual in Europe for its high level of handgun ownership.

Elsewhere most privately held guns are hunting rifles and shotguns," Mr Karp said.

Can't tell a book...
By Julia Duin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

"Revolve" comes in cool magenta, rust orange and periwinkle blue and looks like an especially thick "Mademoiselle" or "YM."

Headlines splashed across the cover include "Beauty Secrets You've Never Heard Before!" "Are You Dating a Godly Guy?" and "How to Get Along With Your Mom."

But unlike other teen mags, this 'zine isn't loaded with anything R-rated. Because it's not really a magazine. It's a Bible.

But it's not your mom's King James Version. Rather, it's "Cosmo" meets Christ for only $14.99. ...

...But Os Guinness, author of the new book "Prophetic Untimeliness: A Challenge to the Idol of Relevance," says efforts like "Revolve" shows Christians aping secular culture.

"Never have evangelicals tried so hard to be relevant and never have they been so irrelevant," he said. "There are so many versions of the Bible, at the end of the day, they all mean less. This is a triumph of marketing over mission. Niche markets are death to taking the Bible seriously."...

From George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (1998), pp.489-90:
Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep" and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately.

We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world.

Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome.

We discussed at length the idea of forcing Saddam personally to accept the terms of Iraqi defeat at Safwan just north of the Kuwait-Iraq border--and thus the responsibility and political consequences for the humiliation of such a devastating defeat. In the end, we asked ourselves what we would do if he refused. We concluded that we would be left with two options: continue the conflict until he backed down, or retreat from our demands. The latter would have sent a disastrous signal. The former would have split our Arab colleagues from the coalition and, de facto, forced us to change our objectives.

WHY DICK CHENEY OPPOSED GOING TO BAGHDAD IN 1991 AT THE TIME OF THE GULF WAR
Dick Cheney in April 1991, then Defense Secretary, as quoted in the Slate on October 16, 2002:
If you're going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go to Baghdad. Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that's currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a
Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that government going to have if it's set up by the United States military when it's there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?

Iraqi police ready to turn guns on US troops
From Richard Lloyd Parry in Fallujah
The Times (London)
September 15, 2003

Iraqi policemen declared themselves holy warriors yesterday and vowed to take revenge for the deaths of their comrades in the town where ten police and a security guard were killed on Friday in the worst "friendly fire" incident of the Iraq conflict. "I am full of hatred for the Americans and I am ready to kill them," said Arkan Adanan, who was injured in the shoulder early on Friday morning when US troops poured rifle and machinegun fire into three police vehicles that were chasing suspected bandits.

"All Fallujah people are Mujahidin and they care only about killing Americans. We don't care about their powerful weapons, because we know that if we die we will become martyrs."

Survivors of the incident and relatives of the dead and injured men made similar comments....

Loud Bible reader duct-taped on US flight

A man had to be restrained on a flight from Hawaii to Los Angeles after he read loudly from the Bible while pacing the aisle.

The man was subdued by passengers and an air marshal on the United Airlines flight from Honolulu.

He was then duct-taped....

Lifting the Wool: Governments Are Mafias, War Is Their Racket
by Alan Bock

...What it comes down to, then, is that the essence of government is force. Without the capacity to coerce citizens into paying taxes and obeying edicts, government is impossible. It is hardly a stretch, however, to note that such an institution is morally virtually indistinguishable from a criminal gang. Indeed, a criminal gang generally finds it more efficient to limit the use of force to those who resist too actively or to teach a lesson. The profits are greater when the merchants simply give in at once to the guys in bulky suits who come around saying, "Nice store you have here. Be a shame if anything happened to it. We can provide protection." But the racket works best, of course, if the merchants know the thugs will follow through on the implied threat, so once in a while an example has to be made.

A decent argument can be made, then, that a government is a mafia that's a little more sophisticated and successful than most outright criminal gangs are – or, as my Sicilian wife once put it, "government is just another gang." But the essence of what defines both is the willingness to use force when persuasion fails. The mafia, if the lore is accurate, even copies government by calling its enforcers "soldiers."

So the brutal truth is that while consent is preferred as the more cost-efficient option, government authority rests on the willingness to use force when it deems force to be necessary. Governments like to sell themselves as the only protection against the uncontrolled and unbridled use of force that would characterize society without such a wielder of "legitimate" force. But their essence is force. The ultimate expression of the essential character of the state, of course, is war, which not only involves killing foreigners who may or may not be a real threat directly, but provides multiple justifications for stepping up the use of force against inconvenient or obstreperous members of the society it rules directly....

Monday, September 15, 2003

New Terror Laws Used Vs. Common Criminals
By DAVID B. CARUSO, Associated Press Writer

PHILADELPHIA - In the two years since law enforcement agencies gained fresh powers to help them track down and punish terrorists, police and prosecutors have increasingly turned the force of the new laws not on al-Qaida cells but on people charged with common crimes....

... Civil liberties and legal defense groups are bothered by the string of cases, and say the government soon will be routinely using harsh anti-terrorism laws against run-of-the-mill lawbreakers.

"Within six months of passing the Patriot Act, the Justice Department was conducting seminars on how to stretch the new wiretapping provisions to extend them beyond terror cases," said Dan Dodson, a spokesman for the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys. "They say they want the Patriot Act to fight terrorism, then, within six months, they are teaching their people how to use it on ordinary citizens."...

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QUOTE OF THE DAY
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, 'Make us your slaves, but feed us.'
-- Dostoevsky

Saturday, September 13, 2003

What's So Special About Those Killed By Hijackers on September 11, 2001?
by Robert Higgs

...On any given day in the United States, more than 6,000 people die. Although some are elderly and may be viewed as persons whose inevitable "time has come," others perish tragically, because they are young or because they are especially worthy and still full of potential. Many persons just leave home for work or shopping and never return, being cut down by accidents or cardiac arrest. Some are murdered – on a typical day about fifty homicides occur. We may presume then that on September 11, 2001, for every person who died at the hands of the murderous hijackers, more than two other persons died in other ways. Why do the deaths of the Twin Towers decedents merit such lavish remembrance whereas the deaths of others whose lives ended on that day merit no remembrance at all? Is there something memorably heroic about having happened to be in the wrong building at an unfortunate moment?

Perhaps the 9/11 deaths stir such hyper-emotional fascination because so many persons perished together. Nobody can know about or keep track of all the thousands of separate deaths that normally occur across the country each day, but everybody can remember just two big adjacent buildings falling down only minutes apart.

Neither the government nor the media, however, make a big ado about commemorating the events of April 19, 1995, when another devastating terrorist attack mangled the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 167 persons (including 19 children) and injuring another 675 persons who required medical treatment. Might the relative lack of interest in recalling this calamitous attack have something to do with its having been mounted by a native-born American and veteran of the U.S. Army, rather than by Arab Muslim zealots? Might the apparent eagerness to forget the attack and its victims spring from the government's desire to discourage the recollection of what motivated it, namely, the government's own murderous assault on the Branch Davidians at Waco precisely two years earlier?

I have a hypothesis about why the government and its lapdog media continue to stimulate such bloated observance of the tragedy of September 11. I maintain that doing so helps greatly to justify the government's initiation and continued prosecution of its current spate of military campaigns, conquests, and occupations in Southwest Asia. Even though the Bush administration has never produced a shred of credible evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks, the administration has never ceased to claim or to insinuate that some "link" existed. This big lie, persistently repeated, has had a big payoff. According to an IBD/TIPP poll conducted during the first week of September 2003, some 63 percent of the respondents believe that al Qaida and the old Iraqi regime were connected....

Friday, September 12, 2003

The Problem With Monotheism
Why the world's two largest faiths, Christianity and Islam, have a tendency to 'turn evil.'

... Well-intentioned people can do things and justify behavior that contradicts what’s at the very heart of their religious tradition, and it can descend into cruel and violent behavior.

One example is a belief in absolute truth. People who believe they have God in their pocket and know what God wants for them have proven time and again that they’re capable of doing anything because it’s not their will but God’s will being carried out. You see this most obviously in a suicide bomber—someone who is convinced he or she knows what God wants, and can end up doing the most horrific things to innocent people.

Another example is blind obedience to a leader. When people become so convinced of a particular person or charismatic leader that they blindly will follow that person, it can lead to Jim Jones and Jonestown. It can lead to the Buddhist group Aum Shinrikyo in Tokyo in 1995 that released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system. There’s a pattern in sects, and also in local churches, where power is concentrated in too few hands with not enough checks and balances. And you can have a charismatic leader who gets out of control.

One of the scariest examples is the belief that the end justifies any means. Every religion is predicated on the notion that something in the world is terribly wrong. If we weren’t ignorant we wouldn’t need the Buddha to enlighten us, and if we weren’t sinful we wouldn’t need Jesus to save us, and if we weren’t forgetful we wouldn’t need Muhammad to guide us. The presupposition that something is wrong is premised on rectifying that wrong, overcoming obstacles, and moving toward a more hopeful future or meaningful end, whether that’s heaven or nirvana or whatever. And often that has a component of making life more just and peaceful. That’s normal.

The problem is when people become convinced they know the route to the peaceable kingdom and they are God’s agents to make it happen. And here is where you get groups of extremist Jews whose messianic mission leads them to tunnel under the Dome of the Rock and try to blow it up in order to facilitate the building of the Third Temple. Or Christian fundamentalist groups who long for Armageddon to the point that they will support violent extremists trying to destroy the Dome of the Rock. Now, pious Orthodox Jews pray for the coming of the Messiah and the Third Temple, which they believe God will bring down from heaven. But that’s a very different thing from saying, "I’m going to give God a helping hand and blow up some buildings in the process."

And this behavior is dangerous in a place like Israel and Palestine. You have millions of Christians fixated on Armageddon theology. They spend a great deal of time watching TV preachers, picking apart Bible verses, looking at headlines in the news, patching together pieces of information to create a sort of image that “Jesus is coming on Tuesday.” But when I read the New Testament it’s pretty clear Jesus says nothing like, “On Judgment Day how much of your puzzle did you piece together?” He says, “When I was hungry, did you give me something to eat, and when I was thirsty did you give me something to drink?” The mandate of following Christ involves reaching out to people in need, and peacemaking. Whether Jesus comes next Tuesday or in a thousand years is really God’s business....

...I saw a female evangelist interviewed a few weeks ago on this very topic, and she was claiming, “I love the Jewish people. These are God’s people.” And someone said, “Yes, but in your theology all but a remnant of them are going to be wiped out. If things unfold the way you believe, most of the Jews are going to be killed.” She smiled into the camera and said, “Well this isn’t me talking--this is God talking.” Now, from where I sit this is not the kind of friends the Jewish people need. She’s perfectly willing to watch the slaughter of Jews because it’s part of “God’s plan.” That’s only a half-step removed from people who are putting dynamite under the Dome of the Rock....

...It may be linked to monotheism. I think that’s worth really thinking about, because there is a sense in which monotheism and the missionary impulse—common to both faiths--are linked to absolutist claims. I readily admit this is a difficult area to talk about because I’m an ordained Baptist minister and a practicing Christian, and I believe there is one God. But I also believe that even if I possess some “absolute truth” in the sense of a connection with God, and we have to be humble in appropriating what we understand to be absolute truth. I think the problem comes when you lose that humility and think you know the mind of God and that you’re carrying this forward oblivious to history....

QUOTE OF THE DAY
The powers in charge keep us in a perpetual state of fear keep us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.
-- General Douglas MacArthur, August 17, 1957

WHY DON'T WE HAVE ANSWERS TO THESE 9/11 QUESTIONS?
By WILLIAM BUNCH
bunchw@phillynews.com

NO EVENT IN recent history has been written about, talked about, or watched and rewatched as much as the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 - two years ago today.

Not only was it the deadliest terrorist strike inside America, but the hijackings and attacks on New York City's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington were also a seminal event for an information-soaked media age of Internet access and 24- hour news.

So, why after 730 days do we know so little about what really happened that day?

No one knows where the alleged mastermind of the attack is, and none of his accomplices has been convicted of any crime. We're not even sure if the 19 people identified by the U.S. government as the suicide hijackers are really the right guys.

Who put deadly anthrax in the mail? Where were the jet fighters that were supposed to protect America's skies that morning? And what was the role of our supposed allies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan?

There are dozens of unanswered questions about the 2001 attacks, but we've narrowed them down to 20 - or 9 plus 11....

Times Change, Principles Don't
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

[Posted September 12, 2003]

A libertarian must never tire of saying "I told you so." Nor is there a dearth of opportunities to do so. Before 9-11, for example, it was the libertarians who said that 1990s sanctions against Iraq and broader intervention in the middle east would inspire terrorism. The libertarians also warned that FAA regulations weren't really making the airlines secure. The libertarians further saw that hundreds of billions spent on "defense" and "intelligence" weren't really providing either.

Thus was 9-11, two years ago, a big "I-told-you-so" moment for libertarians. The hijackers, seething in anger at US policy in the Gulf region and the middle east, exploited a FAA-regulated system with plenty of loopholes for bad guys, to crash into a major financial center, and the US government, despite all its spending and promises, was powerless to stop it.

And yet, in this upside-down world, the big message after 9-11 was not that the government and its ways had failed us. Quite the opposite. We were told that the government would save us. It was libertarianism that failed.

Remember? Hillary Clinton, always exploiting the political moment, said of the efforts to cope on that awful day, "we saw government in action…. It was the elected officials who were leading and comforting." That's an odd way to describe running for their lives, prior to seizing power from their bureaucratic bunkers....

Thursday, September 11, 2003

When I was a kid I was terrified of the End of the World. Kids heard things; older kids who’d read that ridiculous end-times tract, “The Late Great Planet Earth” said it foretold a struggle between the “bear” and the “eagle” and we all knew what that meant. One summer at Bible Camp I asked one of the pastors if this bear-eagle end-of-the-world stuff was true, and he said “we know not the day or the time.” You know, I thought, but you just won’t tell us.

It was 1968. On the night before the last day of camp, a counselor named Charlie Brown interrupted our sunset meeting by the shores of White Bear Lake to tell us the news: Russia had launched their missiles and they would destroy America before the night was out. It was time to get right with God.

Silence; crickets; small sobs. I’m sure no one thought much about Jesus right then. We thought about Mom and Dad and Spot and our room, where we really, really wanted to be right now, with the familiar smell of the goldfish bowl, and -

Charlie Brown guided us through some prayers. We all said Amen, and I’m sure for some it was the least heartfelt Amen we’d ever said. Then Charlie Brown said he had made up the story. Russia hadn’t launched the missiles. But what if they had? Were we right with Jesus?

Back at the barracks we were quiet and unnerved. No one wanted to go to sleep. No one wanted to talk, either. Finally John Larson, the bunkhouse bully, broke the silence. He was the mean kid. He was the one who tormented me at home, and had bothered me at camp. Nelson Muntz without the charm. John Larson expressed his simple wish to stab Charlie Brown in the stomach.

A dozen little Lutheran campers nodded in the dark: ya sure, you betcha....

How Churches Have Failed Singles

...Here some Christian singles may parrot churchy platitudes that they don't need marriage or that they're satisfied in Christ alone. But both experience and the Bible show that adults need companionship and sexual pleasure--and that "two are better than one" in daily life and in the mission of the church. Christian churches need to define healthy biblical adulthood and take steps to bring singles to that state....

...The Church behaves as though every Christian single is uniquely equipped to weather protracted singlehood by the mere fact they have Jesus. Saying that all Christian singles have the gift of celibacy doesn't make those who are suffering unwanted singleness feel better. It also doesn't admonish those who should be held accountable for being chronically single and causing someone else to forfeit marriage.

Blurring the distinction between singleness and celibacy has grave consequences. For one thing, the natural inclination of a young man to be irresponsible is validated when he has the church's permission to put off establishing a permanent home. Similarly, in the guise of compassion, churches often counsel young women to ignore the costs of protracted singlehood and to focus instead on Christian activities or missionary work. Such women forgo legitimate sexual relations and the physical and spiritual protections of a husband, experience waning fertility, and may miss out on having biological children of their own. This garners only resentment, not more Christian servants.

Delaying marriage forces many Christian singles into the abstinence marathon, against which every cell in their bodies revolts. Struggling to endure this suspended, unnatural and unbiblical state for a protracted amount of time, many fail to keep their purity. Giving singles "Biblical twelve steps" to manage sexual desire and find more satisfaction in Jesus won't work, because we're spurning God's blueprint for mankind....

...Contrast that with the situation today. If someone who's single and doesn't want to be asks for help, she can expect to hear glib sayings like "Bloom where you're planted," a lecture on contentment, or suggested courses available at the local seminary to create more busyness and distraction. For women enduring forced singlehood today, the monastic walls have merely been extended....

DOOR INTERVIEW: Michael Graham By John Carney
Issue #189, September/October 2003

One of contributing editor John Carney’s co-workers heard a provocative interview about a book of political satire, Redneck Nation . When John checked it out, he was startled to find that he recognized the author — Michael Graham — because they had been contemporaries at (cue ominous music) Oral Roberts University in the early 1980s. Graham’s book describes ORU as “combining the intellectual rigor of a Sunday School picnic with the sound theological theories of a Sunday School séance.” John’s just happy he escaped with a diploma.....

...DOOR: Referring to religion, you write, “In contemporary America, glaring stupidity is the gold standard of the Christian realm.” How does this redneck quality evidence itself in Christianity?

GRAHAM: I’m a huge fan of (H.L.) Mencken. One of his greatest pieces of writing was his coverage of the Pentecostals outside Dayton, Tenn., during the Scopes Monkey Trial. What he saw there was a group of people who not only were behaving irrationally, as Mencken would judge it, but who had no fundamental belief in the concept that being reasonable, being rational, being intelligent was good. It was evil, as I learned at Oral Roberts University. Oral Roberts was fond of saying “If the Lord had meant you to think for yourself, he’d have given you a mind of your own, hallelujah!”

DOOR: Did he really say, “Hallelujah”?

GRAHAM: Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating slightly, but the fact is that the ethos of southern evangelicalism was that your mind is dangerous, and that you have to fight against the evil temptations of reason. The northern ethos, the kind of Episcopalian Methodist ethos that came down with the freedom riders and the Civil Rights movement, was that it is possible to merge your intellect with your faith, and that you can be very, very bright, and very, very devout at the same time. My family, and the people I grew up with, absolutely rejected that.

Today, in the United States, people with all kinds of metaphysical beliefs also reject that. So you have the bizarre situation of — and this actually happened to me — someone getting into an argument with me about Christianity, and about how any rational adult could believe in Christianity: “It’s ridiculous, it’s just a book. How could you possibly believe that?” The person who’s saying this is wearing a healing crystal, believes that they were a handmaiden to Cleopatra in a previous life, and watches TV psychic John Edward on a regular basis. I’m sorry — you’re an idiot. You happen to be an idiot about a different set of metaphysical constructs, but you’re still an idiot.

DOOR: You praise the northern tradition for having a reason-based faith, but you also say that, “Northern churchgoers believe in God, but not enough to bring it to anyone else’s attention.”...

Saving America
Leo Strauss and the Neoconservatives

...Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, Strauss's best known student, was a professor at the University of Toronto. His best selling book demonized the sixties - the age of civil rights for black Americans, and greater freedom and equality for women. Irving Kristol also demonised the sixties. And Francis Fukuyama, student of Allan Bloom, and vanguard of the neoconservative intellectuals, refers to the sixties as "The Great Disruption," the title of his recent book. Supposedly, all these Strauss-inspired writers believe that the new found freedoms of the sixties are the root of all evil, because freedom invites licentiousness, and licentiousness is a harbinger of social decay - divorce, delinquency, crime, and creature comforts. And there is a sense in which they are right - freedom is a treasure that is quickly lost if it is not wisely used. The trouble is that neoconservatives have zero tolerance for human vices or follies, and as a result, they are unwilling to give liberty a chance.

So, what is to be done? How can America be saved from her dangerous fascination with liberty? Irving Kristol came up with the solution that has become the cornerstone of neoconservative policies: use democracy to defeat liberty. Turn the people against their own liberty. Convince them that liberty is licentiousness - that liberty undermines piety, leads to crime, drugs, rampant homosexuality, children out of wedlock, and family breakdown. And worse of all, liberalism is soft on communism or terrorism - whatever happens to be the enemy of the moment. And if you can convince the people that liberty undermines their security, then, you will not have to take away their liberty; they will gladly renounce it....

Wednesday, September 10, 2003

The Scourge of Militarism
Rome and America
By Chalmers Johnson

The collapse of the Roman republic in 27 BC has significance today for the United States, which took many of its key political principles from its ancient predecessor. Separation of powers, checks and balances, government in accordance with constitutional law, a toleration of slavery, fixed terms in office, all these ideas were influenced by Roman precedents. John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams often read the great Roman political philosopher Cicero and spoke of him as an inspiration to them. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, authors of the Federalist Papers, writing in favor of ratification of the Constitution signed their articles with the name Publius Valerius Publicola, the first consul of the Roman republic.

The Roman republic, however, failed to adjust to the unintended consequences of its imperialism, leading to a drastic alteration in its form of government. The militarism that inescapably accompanied Rome's imperial projects slowly undermined its constitution as well as the very considerable political and human rights its citizens enjoyed. The American republic, of course, has not yet collapsed; it is just under considerable strain as the imperial presidency -- and its supporting military legions -- undermine Congress and the courts. However, the Roman outcome -- turning over power to an autocracy backed by military force and welcomed by ordinary citizens because it seemed to bring stability -- suggests what might happen in the years after Bush and his neoconservatives are thrown out of office....

Bush's Many Miscalculations
On Sept. 11, the president was handed a historic opportunity. He ignored it.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, September 9, 2003, at 4:05 PM PT

Painful as it is to recall those planes smashing into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon two years ago this week, it's nearly as heartbreaking to think back on the moment of nascent harmony that ticked in the wake of the attack—until President Bush decided to reject the opportunity that History thrust before him.

Remember? The French newspaper Le Monde, never one for trans-Atlantic sentimentalism, proclaimed, "We are all Americans." The band outside Buckingham Palace played "The Star-Spangled Banner" during a changing of the guard, as thousands of Londoners tearfully waved American flags. Most significant, the European leaders of NATO, for the first time in the organization's history, invoked Article 5 of its charter, calling on its 19 member-nations to treat the attack on America as an attack on them all—a particularly moving gesture, as Article 5 had been intended to guarantee American retaliation against an attack on Europe.

But the Bush administration brushed aside these supportive gestures—and that may loom as the greatest tragedy of Sept. 11, apart from the tolls taken by the attack itself....

Santa suit for Jesus
By Jonathan Petre, Religion Correspondent
(Filed: 10/09/2003)

A poster depicting a Nativity scene in which the infant Jesus is dressed in a shockingly red Father Christmas-style suit and hat is to be used to encourage churchgoing this Christmas.

In an attempt to promote the Christian festival as more than an opportunity to spend money, the slogan beneath the traditional tableau reads: "Go on, ask Him for something this Christmas."...

Learning to Live With Biometrics
By Claudia Graziano | Also by this reporter Page 1 of 1

02:00 AM Sep. 09, 2003 PT

It's the first day of school and Matt Miller, director of food services for Penn Cambria schools, sits at a table next to the registration desk, collecting digital images of students' fingerprints with a portable scanner.

...Not surprisingly, privacy advocates are worried about the use of biometrics in public schools, where minors are the ones being scanned.

At best, the technology is overkill and a waste of taxpayer money, said Chris Hoofnagle, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C. At worst, it sets a dark precedent, conditioning students at a young age to embrace the idea of Big Brother-style biometric tracking. "If ever there was a generation that would not oppose a government system for universal ID, it's this one," he said....

Oil and wildlife 'can co-exist'
By Alex Kirby
BBC News Online environment correspondent

In a rare tribute to the energy industry, scientists have praised one company's record in exploiting an African oilfield.

Drilling areas are small
They say Shell's field has more wild creatures than the surrounding national parks....

Powell's battle cry fails test of time
Six months after his case swung opinion toward attacking Iraq, his intelligence file looks thin.
By Charles J. Hanley
Associated Press

One evening in February, in a stifling Baghdad conference room, Iraqi bureaucrats, European envoys and foreign reporters crowded before television screens to hear the reading of an indictment.

Half a world away, in the hushed U.N. Security Council chamber in New York, U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was unleashing an avalanche of allegations, speaking of "the gravity of the threat that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction pose to the world."

Powell marshaled what were described as intercepted Iraqi conversations, reconnaissance photos of sites, defectors' accounts, and other intelligence sources.

In the United States, his intelligence file swung opinion toward war.

But in Baghdad, when the satellite broadcast ended, Lt. Gen. Amer al-Saadi, science adviser to Saddam Hussein, appeared before the audience and dismissed the U.S. case as "stunts" aimed at swaying the uninformed.

How does Powell's Feb. 5 indictment look today? He has said several times since then that he stands by it, the State Department said last week. Here is an Associated Press review of major elements, based both on what was known in February and what has been learned since...

US Intervention Backfires – Everywhere
by Ivan Eland

Most of the problems associated with the Bush administration's collapsing foreign policy stem from one central flaw: the attempt to socially engineer the world using military power or intimidation.

In a speech to the nation laced with presumptive rhetoric, the president demanded that allies, Middle Eastern nations and members of the United Nations share the responsibility of bailing the United States out of its self-inflicted quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan.

With a resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, frequent bombings of oil pipelines and other prominent targets in Iraq, an Iraqi infrastructure still in shambles from the war, and an excruciating $166 billion over a two-year period (at the least) for both occupations, you'd think the president would have asked (or perhaps begged) for, rather than demanded, the help of other nations. But the hubris of a superpower and its leader – even when they have their backs to the wall – should never be underestimated....

Tuesday, September 09, 2003

Other People's Sacrifice
By PAUL KRUGMAN

In his Sunday speech President Bush made a call for unity: "We cannot let past differences interfere with present duties." He also spoke, in a way he hasn't before, about "sacrifice." Yet, as always, what he means by unity is that he should receive a blank check, and it turns out that what he means by sacrifice is sacrifice by other people.

It's now clear that the Iraq war was the mother of all bait-and-switch operations. Mr. Bush and his officials portrayed the invasion of Iraq as an urgent response to an imminent threat, and used war fever to win the midterm election. Then they insisted that the costs of occupation and reconstruction would be minimal, ...

Now almost half the Army's combat strength is bogged down in a country that wasn't linked to Al Qaeda and apparently didn't have weapons of mass destruction, and Mr. Bush tells us that he needs another $87 billion, right away. It gives me no pleasure to say this, but I (like many others) told you so. Back in February I asked, "Is this administration ready for the long, difficult, quite possibly bloody business of rebuilding Iraq?" The example of Afghanistan (where warlords rule most of the country, and the Taliban — remember those guys? — is resurgent) led me to doubt it. And I was, alas, right....

It's a War on War

The libertarian meltdown over the continuing occupation of Iraq continues.

...Beito's crticism was that -- as Gene Healy has also noted in the comments section of this site -- it's more than a little disengenuous to say that the federal government isn't competent enough to, for example, manage AFDC or education or Social Security, but that it is capable of rebuilding from scratch an entire country -- particularly one with no tradition of the necessary sustaining institutions to preserve a liberal democracy.

Worse, if you believe that neocons are dictating foreign policy, we're not merely attempting to build an entire country, but the entire Middle East.

Libertarians rightly believe that on the domestic front, government meddling rarely acheives its stated ends, that it usually makes things worse, and that it inevitably effects all sorts of nasty and unintended consequences.

I can't understand why some of us then jump ship when it comes to foreign policy, and believe that if we just spend enough money, send over enough guns, and hire enough smart people to do all the planning, we can create a functioning, liberal, civil democracy out of whole cloth, topple theocracies where there's no desire for democracy, and generally change the hearts and minds of millions of people at the point of gun.

It's just not going to happen, gang. And lots more people are going to die while we try.

Monday, September 08, 2003

Lord of the eschaton
Jeff Cunningham: The glory of Middle Earth and the folly of Left Behind

With the popularity of the Left Behind series making headlines even at the New York Times, it would seem that LaHaye’s version of eschatology is the only viable one for serious Christians. For those of us not impressed with the literature itself or LaHaye’s theological presuppositions, it seems all we have is a theological argument which, for most readers of Left Behind, will seem droll and unimportant. After all, Left Behind has sold something like 10 billion copies; it must be correct. I expect that if sales ever drop off (how long can a book series continue with only a 7 year time period to deal with?), they will start marketing the book with Happy Meals, adding to the digestion problems inherent with such food. Either that or we’ll all be raptured out of here, and LaHaye’s bank account will be duly appropriated by the agents of the Antichrist in order to fund the coming tribulation. But I digress....

Tech Boom; Economic Bust?

There's a great article in this month's issue of Business 2.0 addressing the effect that retiring baby boomers are going to have on future employment. Execs at a number of Fortune 500 companies worry that within the next ten years, the supply of skilled labor is going to fall WAY short of demand.....

More from Radley Balko (the Agitator)

...Meanwhile, as President Bush promises to valiantly spend U.S. tax dollars to clean up the mess he made, as U.S. intellignece, resources and personnel continue to try to head off attacks in Iraq that were instigated by our own doing, the actual culprit behind 9/11 -- Osama bin Laden -- is still apparently alive and well, according to the New Yorker . Not only that, but he's living in a fairly modernized stone home in Afghanistan, whith creature comforts, and is planning his next round of attacks on the United States.

So to recap, we continue to lose troops, tax dollars and intelligence resources toward capturing a man who attacked the United States zero times in the last ten years and killed exactly zero Americans. Meanwhile, the man who has attacked the United States at least four times in the last ten years, not to mention several other attacks on Western interests, and has killed over 3,000 Americans, continues to live on, and to plan more attacks.

And while we're rebuilding from scratch a country that had barely tenuous ties to anti-American terrorism, Colin Powell went on the Sunday tak show circuit yesterday to unquestionably declare Pakistan and Saudi Arabia -- two countries that countless media outlets have exposed as direct financiers of terrorism and direct corroboratives of al-Qaeda -- as "firm allies....

Organ music 'instils religious feelings'
By Jonathan Amos
BBC News Online science staff, in Salford

People who experience a sense of spirituality in church may be reacting to the extreme bass sound produced by some organ pipes.

Many churches and cathedrals have organ pipes that are so long they emit infrasound which at a frequency lower than 20 Hertz is largely inaudible to the human ear.

But in a controlled experiment in which infrasound was pumped into a concert hall, UK scientists found they could instil strange feelings in the audience at will.

These included an extreme sense of sorrow, coldness, anxiety and even shivers down the spine....

...The results showed that odd sensations in the audience increased by an average of 22% when the extreme bass was present.

"It has been suggested that because some organ pipes in churches and cathedrals produce infrasound this could lead to people having weird experiences which they attribute to God," said Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist from University of Hertfordshire.

"Some of the experiences in our audience included 'shivering on my wrist', 'an odd feeling in my stomach', 'increased heart rate', 'feeling very anxious', and 'a sudden memory of emotional loss'.

"This was an experiment done under controlled conditions and it shows infrasound does have an impact, and that has implications... in a religious context and some of the unusual experiences people may be having in certain churches." ...

QUOTE OF THE DAY
...If Bush ends up as a one term – or less – President, how much blame can be laid at the feet of the so-called religious right?

These bastards stop at nothing. They prostitute the name of Christ. They vitiate salvation to support the bottom lines of gun runners, propagandists, and people who act as nothing short of agents of the Devil. If Christians seriously wonder why it is that America has lost its way, they need only look at these sanctimonious multimillionaires of the pulpit who kiss the ass of empire, day in and day out, like the whores of Babylon they are. Bush needs to purge these people, without apology and without delay. They fetishize violence and power, and bear no relation to the Christ who died for my sins. Finis.
-- Anthony Gancarski

New poll shows Bush approval rate slipping
UTICA, N.Y., Sept. 7 (UPI) -- The latest Zogby America poll indicates President Bush's performance rating is at its lowest point since his pre-Inauguration days.

Bush's popularity has been on a steady decline since a post-Sept. 11 peak, Zogby America said on its Web site.

In last week's poll of 1,013 likely voters, only 45 percent rated Bush's job performance good or excellent, Zogby said.

Fifty-four percent of the respondents rated Bush's performance as fair or poor and only 40 percent said he deserved to be re-elected....

Time to face reality of failure in Iraq
By Steve Chapman

September 5, 2003

CHICAGO - Back when the occupation of Iraq was expected to consist of a victory parade and a glorious flowering of democracy, the Bush administration was content to handle the job alone. But this week, it finally acknowledged that the only thing worse than being mired in a catastrophe is being mired there all by yourself. So it is planning to solicit the United Nations for volunteers to share its misery.

This is quite a reversal for a president who previously thought the reason you need allies is so you have someone to alienate. Whether he will find many countries eager to furnish large numbers of human targets for Iraq's shooting gallery is another question. As the Aug. 19 bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad proved, the people intent on driving out American forces are equally prepared to slaughter anyone else who looks like an occupier....

Sunday, September 07, 2003

QUOTE OF THE DAY
Whenever the devil harasses you, seek the company of men or drink more, or joke and talk nonsense, or do some other merry thing. Sometimes we must drink more, sport, recreate ourselves, and even sin a little to spite the devil, so that we leave him no place for troubling our consciences with trifles. We are conquered if we try too conscientiously not to sin at all. So when the devil says to you: do not drink, answer him: I will drink, and right freely, just because you tell me not to.
-- Martin Luther

US public thinks Saddam had role in 9/11
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer

Seven in 10 Americans continue to believe that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had a role in the 11 September 2001 attacks, even though the Bush administration and congressional investigators say they have no evidence of this.
Sixty-nine per cent of Americans said they thought it at least likely that Saddam was involved in the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, according to a Washington Post poll published yesterday. That impression, which exists despite the fact that the hijackers were mostly Saudi nationals acting for al-Qaeda, is broadly shared by Democrats, Republicans and independents....

Donate or else, drug companies told staff
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Gardiner Harris

During the 2000 presidential campaign in the US, executives at Bristol-Myers Squibb, one of America's largest drug companies, received an urgent message: Donate money to George Bush.

The message did not come from Republican campaign officials. It came from top Bristol-Myers executives, according to four executives who say they donated to Mr Bush under pressure from their bosses.

The four, who asked not to be named, said they were told to donate the maximum - $US1000 ($1500) in their own name and $US1000 in their spouse's - and if they failed to do so, their names would be forwarded to the company's then chief executive, Charles Heimbold....

The U.N. and Iraq
By Paul Craig Roberts

Do you remember the ridicule neocons heaped on critics who predicted a quagmire in Iraq? Now neocons William Kristol and Robert Kagen are calling for more troops and more money — two more Army divisions and an additional $60 billion, to be exact. "Next spring, if disaster looms," they write, "it may be too late."
Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona — who experienced, but has forgotten, the Vietnam quagmire — has taken the bait and is urging President Bush to send more troops. But there are no troops to send. The Pentagon doesn't know where it is going to get the troops to carry on the occupation of Iraq at the present level of troop strength....

Saturday, September 06, 2003

Prince uncovers 19th-century plot to make Texas German

AN EXTRAORDINARY 19th- century plot by German nobility to take over Texas and turn it into a German country has been uncovered by a historian looking through old records of some of Germany’s oldest families.

Prince Hans von Sachsen-Altenburg discovered that in the 1840s, when Texas was still a republic, the nobles managed to raise a small fortune from the state of Prussia under cover of an economic club known as the Adelsverein, or Association of Nobility.

The association used the money to send almost 8,000 members to Texas on the pretext they were fleeing political persecution or poverty. But, according to the historian, many were wealthy aristocrats and military officers planning to take control of the republic.....

Friday, September 05, 2003

What would Jesus drink?

It has been well said that while the Christian drinks to remember, the unbeliever drinks to forget. The unbeliever uses wine to drown his misery, to forget his fellows, and to forget his Creator. Contra the unbeliever, Christ commanded his followers to drink wine "in remembrance of me."

In the preaching of the Word of God we hear God's voice; but in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper we feel God's kiss. The Lord's Supper is not only a sensual reminder; it is a sensual communication that God loves us so much that he actually drinks and eats with us!
-- Jim West

God has created us to really enjoy life. This is his gift to us. Everything that God has made is there simply to be enjoyed. Our God is a God of delight who has created us to enjoy our lives, our leisure, and every aspect of our humanity. Christ has come to redeem us that we might fully enjoy the great glory of His creation forever.
-- Jerram Barrs

We are jolly fellows, we Germans; we eat, and drink, and sing, and break our glasses . . .
-- Martin Luther

Colin Powell and 'The Power of Audacity'
[from the September 22, 2003 issue]

One of the problems with the media coverage of this Administration is that it requires bad manners. I don't mean the kind of bad manners usually associated with reporters: shouting over one another, elbowing a colleague to get closer to one's interview subject or even quoting an anonymous source reporting that so-and-so really isn't up to the job. Rather, to be an honest, objective and fair-minded reporter of the Bush Administration's policies requires pointing out repeatedly and without sentimentality that just about all the men and women responsible for the conduct of this nation's foreign (and many of its domestic) affairs are entirely without personal honor when it comes to the affairs of state. This simply isn't done in respectable journalism, and the Bush people understand that. Arthur Miller, speaking at a Nation Institute dinner last year, termed the willingness to use this kind of knowledge "the power of audacity."...

...In a truly nutty editorial published in June, Washington Times editors observed that "86 percent of Americans continue to be certain, or at least believe it is likely, that before the war Iraq not only had the facilities to develop weapons of mass destruction, but that it also possessed biological or chemical weapons." The editors were arguing that Americans don't care that their leaders deliberately misled them to convince them to enter this apparently never-ending quagmire, and so neither should the media. It's quite a trick: Lie to the American people and then fall back on the fact that they bought the lies to demonstrate that truth really doesn't matter anyway. It is in this and only this Alice-in-Wonderland universe that a dishonest propagandist like Colin Powell may be considered an "internationalist," a "moderate" and, sadly, a "man of honor."

Jesus is My Boyfriend
...The first thing I dislike about some praise and worship songs is their excessive use of the singular first person who “loves” some vaguely defined second person. When I took over the responsibility of leading worship last year, the very first thing I did was go through the master Powerpoint list and eliminate any songs that sounded like they were composed by Elton John or Celine Dion. One such song is “In the Secret.” The song’s lyrics are absolutely terrible:

In the secret, in the quiet place
In the stillness you are there.
In the secret, in the quiet hour I wait,
Only for you.

If I didn’t know any better, I would think this song was written to Jodie Foster by John Hinckley.....

Voting by Net Proxy?
Could Software 'Agents' One Day Cast Our Ballots?

Face it, you're more concerned with who was voted off the latest reality television show than where California governor hopeful Arnold Schwarzenegger stands on health care.

A futurist at a pioneering new technology school in Italy has envisioned a piece of software that could help you weed through all the political issues without picking up a newspaper, visiting a Web site, or even, someday, stepping into a voting booth.

Jason Tester, 25, has spent the last two years in the foothills of the Italian Alps in a small town called Ivrea. At the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, a very new school built to develop new products and services, the Stanford-educated American has been studying where the U.S.'s form of democracy is headed.

"People are used to technology in their voting now. I just wanted to see what happened when you take that further," he says. And he admits he's worried about the trend toward touch-screen voting machines and other technology-enhanced voting mechanisms.

You might call him the George Orwell of voting technology, since Tester has been playing devil's advocate on just how drastically high-tech balloting could alter our our right to civic representation.

He built a prototype for what he thinks could be the future of voting: an agent that mines your online and other computer habits to extract a political ideology, and then makes voting recommendations — or more omniously, even casts the ballots for you.....

Penned, Trapped
The absurd claim that PATRIOT increases your privacy
Nick Gillespie

If there's one honor I cherish more than being an actual dyed-in-the-khaki-wool Eagle Scout, it's being named an enemy of the state on Attorney General John Ashcroft's new propaganda site, Preserving Life & Liberty. (One way you know immediately it's propaganda is that it uses a quote from the Declaration of Independence, in a ye-olde-tyme font, as a banner on every single page on the site.) It turns out that I'm one of those rat bastards who, as Ashcroft once famously put it, "scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty." Hi, mom!...

QUOTE OF THE DAY
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.
-- H.L. Mencken

Thursday, September 04, 2003

George W's spending problem
Bruce Bartlett

The Republican Party's conservative base is becoming increasingly restless with George W. Bush's unwillingness to restrain the growth of federal spending in any way. Last week brought another shot across his bow, when the Manchester Union Leader, one of America's most important conservative newspapers, attacked him for caving in to big spenders.

The occasion for the Union Leader's Aug. 31 editorial was a visit to New Hampshire by newly appointed Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie. According to the paper, Gillespie basically said that the Republicans' longtime war against big government has now ended. Government won....

What can churches do to be more relevant to "our" generation?

...Now I'm working in Colorado and I'm hitting the same thing again. The only
twentysomething services I've ever been too are these amazing productions to
entertain me and a watered-down message. I want some meat, for goodness sake!
And although the sweet band is pretty cool and I love the video presentations,
where's the reality? Why are we trying so hard? It kind of makes me sad. And it
makes me wonder ? am I supposed to just drop out of church until I can join the
'young-marrieds' class? ...

What Were They Thinking?
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

With bombings, killings, human suffering all around, and nothing in sight in Iraq but the bad choices of continued military dictatorship or fundamentalist Islamic rule, everyone but the war planners now regard Iraq as a disaster.....

...One thing war does do in the short term is cause people to rally around the flag, an effect which the political cynics count on to cover the disaster that war always is. But there was more than this operating at the White House. They didn’t want to merely boost Bush's poll ratings; they wanted to instill a new national ethos to supplant one that they didn't like. The neocons who gave us this war believed that Americans needed a new civic mythology to unite the country around great ideals, and that cheering on a war would revive the idea of national unity.

They longed for the Cold-War ideal when an entire population hunkered down as hostages to the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Their writings heralded the eras of "national greatness" when the Panama Canal was built, when every business displayed a Blue Eagle, when every American mourned the death of JFK, when everyone cheered the moonshot. The "national mood" following 9-11 convinced them that this could be revived.

Even more than that, they continue to convince themselves of the great Lincoln Myth, a man who used immoral means to unite a country but somehow managed to emerge from it with the reputation of a great liberator, a new founding father. The trick, they believed, was to have the "moral determination" to inflict as much violence as possible in the hopes that they would be seen as visionaries, and to utterly demoralize the enemy.

In fact, the idea of national unity, beloved by every would-be tyrant, is something to be feared. It is not a sign of freedom but of despotism. It is the morality of the ant heap. In any case, the forced unity of the World War II era is long gone. Good riddance. The country is too diverse, and the culture too broken into niche markets, too many people too knowing. May the un-American "unity" of the World War II period never return....

The Greatest Ignorance of the Greatest Number
by James Bovard, August 2003 (Posted September 3)

...Political scientist Michael Delli Carpini, after analyzing thousands of voter surveys, told the Washington Post that there was “virtually no relationship” between the political issues that low-knowledge voters said “matter most to them and the positions of the candidates they voted for on those issues. It was as if their vote was random.”

The Post estimated that roughly 36 percent of voters were “low knowledge” — a far larger percentage than the deciding margins in almost all contested congressional and presidential elections. Thirty percent were classified as “high knowledge.”

Overall, the Post-Harvard survey found that more than half of all Americans agreed with the following statement: “Politics and government are so complicated that a person like me can’t really understand what’s going on.”

If someone declared that traffic laws are so complicated that he couldn’t figure out which side of the road to drive on, most people would support yanking that person’s driver’s license. Yet no amount of ignorance can disqualify a voter from a role in choosing representatives and presidents....

Wednesday, September 03, 2003

How to Really Keep the Commandments in Alabama—and Elsewhere
Since when did the public display of the Ten Commandments become the eleventh commandment?
By Joseph Loconte | posted 09/03/2003

When Jesus was pressed to identify the most important commandments in all of Jewish law, his answer was both a summons and a rebuke. There were, quite literally, hundreds of commands to choose from. Yet behind them all, he said, was this: Love God with all your heart, love your neighbor as yourself. "All the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments." That's worth keeping in mind as the spectacle in Alabama over the posting of the Ten Commandments plays itself out in the courts.

Indeed, the rhetoric of many activists suggests that a deeply rooted temptation in the Christian church is alive and well: the impulse to reduce the faith to its externals.

Judge Roy Moore is surely right that the presence of the Decalogue in a state courthouse is no violation of the First Amendment. And it's a matter of history, as he says, that the Ten Commandments supplied much of the bedrock of the Western legal tradition. It's hard not to admire Moore's defiant stand for God's moral norms in public life. Yet he and his supporters, nearly all evangelical Christians, are on dangerous ground when they appear to use the posting of the Commandments as a litmus test for the faithful. In defending their willingness to disregard a federal court ruling, they argue thus: "We must obey God's law, not man's law."

Since when did the public display of the Ten Commandments become the eleventh commandment? This style of argument hints at a tension that has shaped Protestant Christianity since the Reformation....

...Nevertheless, the reflex to establish what Christian philosopher Dallas Willard calls "boundary markers"—legalistic cues as to who belongs in God's family and who doesn't—seems just as strong in Protestantism. The Calvinists helped pave the way with their almost manic fixation on the "signs of the elect." Fundamentalist Christians of all kinds have elevated this impulse into an art form. Tithing, affirming the inerrancy of Scripture, speaking in religious buzzwords, leading a church ministry, belonging to a mid-week Bible study—such are considered the tell-tale marks of the faithful.

As an evangelical, I've tasted (and, regrettably, dished out) this version of Christianity many times. Several years ago I moved into Washington, D.C. and joined a Southern Baptist church. In introducing the church's venerable history, the pastor proudly explained that in the late 19th century the congregation had expelled a man from fellowship over marital problems. Their ruling was singled out as one of the "marks of a healthy church." What we never learned, however, was the ultimate fate of that disciplined member: The Bible's emphasis on the restoration of the fallen believer never entered the conversation. What mattered most, it seemed, was that orthodoxy was defended, the faithful were clearly defined—and the troublemaker was effectively dismissed....

...An unhealthy emphasis on externals also gives people an impossibly blinkered view of life. A 1934 meeting of the Baptist World Alliance in Berlin offers an extreme example. Delegates had arrived with apprehension about the new German Fuhrer and his Nazi Party. But many returned to America with favorable views. Why? As the Alliance noted: "It is reported that Chancellor Adolf Hitler gives to the temperance movement the prestige of his personal example, since he neither uses intoxicants nor smokes." A year earlier Hitler had burned down the Reichstag, declared a one-party state and imposed laws excluding Jews from government and public life. But Boston pastor John Bradbury gave the Nazis high marks for the enforcement of public morality. "It was a great relief to be in a country where salacious sex literature cannot be sold … The new Germany has burned great masses of corrupting books and magazines along with its bonfires of Jewish and communistic libraries."

Evangelicals are not alone, of course, in their tendency to choose law over grace. Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Muslims—there's plenty of competition from the world's religious communities. More than most, however, evangelicals have the theology and the spiritual resources to resist this temptation. Resisting it, in fact, may prove to be the surest road to renewal.

The Burden of Bad Memes
PATRIOTs and Chicken Littles
Julian Sanchez

It's official: The fashionable fall meme for unreconstructed Bush administration cheerleaders is the notion that civil-libertarian concerns about the PATRIOT Act have been much ado about nothing: the squawking of so many Chicken Littles.

The defense of PATRIOT has been slow in coming, in part because it was possible, at first, to dismiss criticism as predictable carping from the usual suspects: the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and other notorious "fifth columnists," to borrow the new right's sledgehammer-subtle imprecation du jour. Things became trickier once American Baptist Churches, the American Conservative Union, Gun Owners of America, and folks like Georgia ex-representative Bob Barr began voicing reservations. The conservative base has begun to get nervous....

Tuesday, September 02, 2003

Pop Goes the Bible
The New Testament Meets Cosmo, as Pop Culture and Religion Intersect

By Oliver Libaw

Aug. 26— With religion and pop culture intersecting more and more these days, perhaps it was inevitable: The Bible's gotten a Cosmo-style makeover.

With a trio of smiling teenage girls on the cover, along with teasers for beauty tips and dating advice, Revolve looks like it has more in common with Glamour than Gideon....

Prosecutors challenging reversals of convictions based on DNA evidence
Sunday, August 31, 2003

By ADAM LIPTAK, New York Times News Service

SHARPES — After seeing more than 130 prisoners freed by DNA testing in the last 15 years, prosecutors in Florida and across the country have mounted a vigorous challenge to a wave of similar new cases.

Prosecutors acknowledge that DNA testing is reliable, but they have grown increasingly skeptical of its power to prove innocence in cases where there was other evidence of guilt. Defense lawyers say these prosecutors, who often relied on the same biological evidence to convict the defendants before DNA testing was available, are more committed to winning than to justice....

Monday, September 01, 2003

i kissed civil religion goodbye
bringing the church back home
dan trotter

At the University of South Carolina in the radical early seventies, I almost lost my faith, and then I found it, courtesy of a small group of misfitted Jesus people radicals. It was through them that I learned about radical, biblical, New Testament house church Christianity. That oasis of heaven in the midst of a radical leftist hell is something that marked me for life. The exhilarating experience of church life in the midst of a radically antichristian culture, and reading Watchman Nee’s Normal Christian Church Life, set me on a course from which I have not deviated. I want to know the church as it was in Jesus’ mind when he established it, and commissioned his apostles to plant it.

Now I am getting old, and I am no longer thrilled about America. It is pagan to its roots. Its media, its universities and colleges, its think tanks, its political parties, its businesses, its entertainment and popular culture, its public schools, and worst of all, its church institutions (for the most part) are apostate. When its politicians incessantly invoke “Gawd,” I try to restrain the nausea.

I looked to the conservative church to fight the rot, but the church was not there for me. The stifling ecclesiastical bureaucracies, the preening professionalism of its pastorate, its shallowness, its cowardly compromises, and in many cases, its downright immorality left me looking elsewhere....

Killing of Ayatollah Is Start of Iraqi Civil War
Commentary, William O. Beeman,
Pacific News Service, Aug 29, 2003

The bombing of one of Islam's holiest shrines not only killed an important Shi'a leader, it also signals the first shot in an Iraqi civil war that Middle East experts warned would ensue if Saddam were removed without careful planning.

The assassination of Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim in Najaf on August 28 is the opening volley in the coming Iraqi Civil War. The United States will reap the whirlwind.

One of the most consistent and ominous prewar warnings to the Bush administration by Middle East experts was that removal of Saddam Hussein without the most careful political and social engineering would result in the breaking apart of Iraq into warring factions that would battle each other for decades.

The hawks in the White House would not listen. They were so wedded to the fantasy scenario that the removal of Saddam in an act of "creative destruction" would result in the automatic emergence of democracy. They brushed aside all warnings....