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Praise the Lord and Pass the Thumbscrews
...Walker: "Making moral decisions in the workplace where it is easy to go along and get along takes courage. It takes moral strength and courage to say, 'I'm not going to do this because I don't think it's the right thing to do.' "

The report: Officials could escape torture convictions by arguing that they were following superior orders, since such orders "may be inferred to be lawful" and are "disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate."

And so there you have it: Mary L. Walker - Christian, Republican, Patriot, Torture Attorney.

Air Force Ignored Sex Abuse At Academy, Inquiry Reports
NATIONAL DESK | September 23, 2003, Tuesday

ABSTRACT - Civilian commission probing sexual assaults at United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, reports top Air Force leaders disregarded persistent warnings over last decade that frequent and unpunished assaults were undermining academy; says Mary L Walker, Air Force general counsel, largely ignored history of official neglect in her June report in effort to shield leaders from public criticism; holds sexual assault was problem at academy throughout last decade, and possibly since women were first admitted in 1976; commission head Tillie Fowler says problem continues to this day, news conference; findings surprise victims' advocates, who feared panel, named by Defense Sec Donald H Rumsfeld, was biased against women in military; panel releases report after meetings with Rumsfeld and Sec James G Roche

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My Faith Is In The Rock And My Name Is On The Roll
...if one spends much time listening to “Christian” music and one is aware of “secular” music, it is obvious that as a genre, CCM is derivative. CCM artists act as kidneys for their largely evangelical audience, straining secular pop culture and inserting Dogmatically Correct lyrics. Until the Jesus Movement, Christian music was largely old-time music, bluegrass, gospel, and drippy ditties performed by acts with Gaither in somewhere in their names. When “Christian Rock” was evolving, there was no infrastructure designed for it, and the closest thing was the small network of radio stations and labels that promoted gospel music being made by white people. The aesthetic and mores of that demographic determined the course of CCM up to today....

...Genre does not merely determine the style of music; packed with musical style are rhetorical patterns, ways of seeing the world, and attitudes. Blues musicians mustn’t stray too far from the blues’ essential dissatisfaction with the world; rappers, even those who find the bling-obsession and confrontational attitude of popular rap music distasteful, must still self-aggrandize. Bubblegum pop must address the high drama of teenage throwaway romances; industrial music must address and embody human despair and hopelessness. Some genres are therefore more suited to expressions of evangelical lives (there are almost no Catholic or liberal Protestant CCM bands; it is a wholly evangelical endeavor). The singer-songwriter genre, for example, lends itself easily to the kind of introspection one finds in the Psalms or the middle of the book of Romans; folk music, because it has always been prophetic, is easily put to the same use by evangelical folk singers. Genres that can’t be as easily imported must either bend the rather static evangelical doctrine to their requirements or lose essential elements of what makes them what they are.

It is in this importing process that the internal tensions of CCM arise. Usually the CCM artist allows the discourse of evangelical theology to co-opt the surface-level features of a genre (musical style, graphic design, costumes) while ditching the attitudes and ideas that make the genre function resulting in terrible or bland music; rock and roll that champions the causes of the establishment isn’t just a betrayal - it’s also boring....

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"Christian Reflections in a Time of War" - Part I -Written after the Abu Ghraib Prison Photos Were Released
...Our previous president had a love affair with a young Jewish intern. This was despicable to many of us, disgusting, dishonoring. Our current president also has a kind of special affection - with Evangelical Christianity. Many of us have an infatuation with him that may eventually hurt us as much as that young intern was hurt after her infatuation. Our current president certainly knows how to use our Evangelical language to woo us. In his State of the Union address in 2002, for example, he said, “The need is great. But there’s power, wonder-working power … in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people.” He was borrowing from a popular hymn well known to nearly all Evangelical Christians, but he substituted “the goodness … of the American people” for “the blood of the Lamb.” Does that turn of phrase bother you? I do not believe the president meant to idolize the American people and imply that we are the world’s redeemers – that would be a blasphemous assertion for a Christian to make! I do not believe he had evil intent. I believe he very sincerely feels that America is in some way God’s chosen nation, so our hearts are a redemptive force in the world, like “the blood of the Lamb.” I believe he is sincere and well-meaning in these kinds of statements, but I also believe he is dangerously wrong. And if we do not see and name the danger, I fear we will become unwitting conspirators with it.

I am writing in the days after the release of photographs from Abu Ghraib prison. The horrible abuse of prisoners by our soldiers in Iraq tells us something – something that we may not want to hear. It tells us that Americans are simply human beings. Along with heroism and sacrifice, we are capable of terrible mistakes and unjustified violence, even torture. We are not above committing deplorable acts and violating our own high standards. In our zeal to do good (by obtaining needed intelligence from enemies, to save the lives of our soldiers), we may do terrible evil. We are capable of seeking a short-term advantage (brutally treating prisoners in violation of the Geneva Conventions) that creates horrific long-term consequences (when our enemies decide to do unto ours as we have done to theirs). In our desire to achieve good ends (to avoid another terrorist attack on our homeland), we may be corrupted by evil means.

I know this is hard for people to imagine, but I beg you to try: what if our decision to invade and bomb Iraq in the first place was an excessive and premature use of violence, no less justifiable before God than the actions of our soldiers in Abu Ghraib? What if our desire to do good (protect ourselves from further terrorist attacks) put us in temptation’s way to overreact and do evil? What if our violation of the will of the United Nations was no less egregious, with no less significant long-term consequences, than our soldiers’ violation of the Geneva Conventions? What if these recent prison abuse incidents are not anomalies – but are rather a warning, a mirror in which we can see what we are in danger of becoming, what we have to some degree already become?

Already, in the midst of tepid or qualified apologies, I hear ourselves defending ourselves. We try to push all the blame on a few individuals acting alone, denying that our system was in any way to blame. ...

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Doubt: The Tides of Faith
Doubt. It’s like a spiritual drought, a starless night of the soul, a low tide when faith seems to have retreated forever. Nearly all of us experience these dry, dark, difficult times when God doesn’t seem real and it’s hard to keep going, much less growing. Sometimes these low tides of faith are connected with events … the death of a loved one, a broken relationship, the loss of a job, a prolonged illness, questions raised by a book or professor. But sometimes they seem to come out of nowhere; it’s sunny and bright outside, but inside you feel dark , cloudy, gray, empty.

As a pastor, I have to deal with matters of faith and doubt on a daily basis. But it’s not just other people’s faith struggles I have to face; I experience my own high and low tides of faith even in the midst of an active ministry. Through it all I have learned that doubt can be a doorway to spiritual growth.

Before becoming pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church here in the Baltimore-Washington area, I was a college teacher in a secular university. I was struck there by how superficial many of our Christian answers are in light of the profound questions being asked. Ever since, I have wanted to help Christians have a deeper, more thoughtful faith, and I have wanted to help spiritual seekers get good answers to their probing questions to help them come to a faith that is honest, vibrant, and growing.

The church I serve is composed of about 55% people who are new to a committed Christian faith. One of the great things about these people is that they haven’t learned how to be dishonest yet, spiritually speaking. For example, I remember how one woman, a growing Christian for several years now, came up to me after church one Sunday and said, “Brian, please pray for me. I’m going through one of those stages again when I don’t believe that God exists.” Really, although that kind of honesty is rare, those kinds of doubts aren’t rare at all. I’ll bet some of you are nodding your heads right now, saying, “Yes. I’ve been there” – or “I’m there right now.”...

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Satan loses his sulphur
...Church of Fools is a cross between a computer game and an 11th-century Romanesque sanctuary. One visitor looked around with her five-year-old son on her lap. "Wow!" he said. "Who's on your team and which ones do you kill?" – a sentiment many traditional churchgoers will recognise....

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Government Is Not “Us”
“America is not what’s wrong with the world. I read all this stuff — people hate us, people don’t like us. The fact of the matter is, people line up to come into this country every year because it’s better here than other places, and because they respect the fact that we respect human beings.”

So says Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

It could be that those who line up are making a distinction that Rumsfeld seems unable to make, namely, the distinction between the American people and the U.S. government. There’s a world of difference between them. Poll after poll in the Middle East indicates that the public there understands that difference. While Arabs generally express good feelings toward Americans and their society (or did until the Abu Ghraib revelations), they express disdain for U.S. government policy toward their region. This shows a discrimination that our so-called leaders need to learn.

When Rumsfeld talks about “us,” he blurs a crucial distinction, most likely intentionally. But a moment’s thought is all it takes to see that we, the American people, are not the government and vice versa. One example should suffice: when you rushed to finish your income tax return at the last minute on April 15, were you in fear of yourself and your fellow Americans or the IRS? ...

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If you want good information, ask around - a lot
Large groups are more accurate that any expert

In 1906, English scientist Francis Galton visited a country livestock fair and stumbled upon an intriguing contest. An ox was about to be slaughtered, and the villagers in attendance were invited to guess the animal's weight after being slaughtered and dressed. Nearly 800 gave it a go, and not surprisingly, no one hit the exact mark: 1,198 pounds. Astonishingly, however, the average of those 800 guesses came close - very close indeed.

It was 1,197 pounds....

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Buddhists target 30-140 window
TIBET — Buddhist evangelistic groups are aggressively targeting the 30-140 window where most of the world's Christians reside, in an unprecedented effort to promote the Buddhist religion. The campaign's title refers to the longitudinal area that includes North and South America, which Buddhists consider a mission field ripe for harvest.

"We are praying over maps, meeting during the week and interceding for the un-enlightened people of the Americas," says one Buddhist priest who subsists on goat cheese and dandelion stems at a temple 14,000 feet up in the Himalayas. His congregation of 150, though poor, is devoted to the 30-140 proselytizing effort, and they pray fervently for the U.S. and other nations every Wednesday evening. Several laypeople, who say they have the gift of intercession, spend hours spinning the prayer wheel and asking various gods to invade the Americas with a Buddhist revival.

The 30-140 campaign, launched last year at a prayer and fasting convention of Buddhist leaders in Tibet, has brought new focus to the religion. They have distributed nearly two million color-coded prayer maps, featuring statistics and guides for each region in the window. For example, the prayer guide for July 2004 focuses on the American South. The prayer guide depicts crowds of what appear to be sad and confused parishioners slumping into church, and the caption reads, "Because of its long Christian history, the American South is swathed in spiritual darkness, but as the influence of the Christian myth wanes in popular culture, more people are opening up to the light of true knowledge. Pray that cultural traditions will fall, and that your prayers to the demon-god Osiris will pave the way for the Buddha's teachings."...

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A Thought Experiment for All You Right-Wingers
If you think the greatest danger to your life is from Islamic radicals, then try this thought experiment:

Go burn a Koran on your front lawn. Then, go sit on your front lawn holding your shiny, new, unregistered machinegun.

Question: Who will come after you first, the jihadists, or your local police?

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"I'm often amazed at the way politicians, who spend hours poring over opinion poll results in a desperate attempt to discover what the public thinks, are certain they know precisely what God's views are on everything."
-- Simon Hoggart

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Scorpio: (Oct. 24—Nov. 21)
Sometimes it feels like true happiness slipped past you in an instant. In reality, it crept by slowly, taking extreme care not to be seen.

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''The priorities of the Godly''
...But what got my friend’s knickers in a knot about the ABC news item was not the [Abu Ghraib] photos themselves; they are repulsive, but they are no worse than what any other news outlet has been displaying for the past couple of weeks. What made him, and me, see red was the warning that accompanied the photos. The photos in question are, at the time of this writing, to be found at [Click Here] and because of the disturbing and sensitive nature of the photos, they are prefaced by a warning for viewers which reads:

WARNING: The following graphic depictions include nudity. Viewer discretion is advised.

Let me quote directly from my friend’s email message to me because he says it as well or better than I would. He wrote that he sees “something distinctly disturbing about a society that can show pix of corpses being gloated over by pretty young army girls, of bloody and battered bodies -- the result of torture -- and of human beings being humiliated, abused and degraded ... and this to carry a warning that the nudity may offend. (Particularly when said nudity is fuzzed out in the pictures anyway.)

"Either that, or this is a way of subtly boosting the humiliation of the Iraqi people -- 'only the sight of your bodies offends us -- not what's done to them.' ...

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Denison church's tax-exempt status granted
AUSTIN _ Reversing an earlier decision, state Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn announced Monday that a Unitarian church in Denison would get its tax-exempt status after all.

The decision came after the Star-Telegram reported on May 18 that the comptroller's office had ruled the Red River Unitarian Universalist Church was not a religious organization for tax purposes.

The status was denied, the state said, because the church "does not have one system of belief."

Stunned church officials said it was the first time in U.S. history that any state had denied tax exempt status to the Unitarians because of their religious philosophy....

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The Religious Side of the Abu Ghraib Scandal
As prisoners forced to renounce faith, guards repudiated theirs voluntarily.

...The first item comes from Spec. Joseph M. Darby, who reportedly confronted Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr.—apparent ringleader of the prison abuse—about the activities. Darby later told investigators that Graner told him, "The Christian in me says it's wrong, but the corrections officer in me says, 'I love to make a grown man piss himself.'"

That the Christian in Graner lost out (in fact, it wasn't just the prisoner's own urine that Graner reportedly liked to see prisoners soaked in) is ripe for much commentary.

But far more troubling is an allegation that guards deliberately attacked the prisoners' faith. Details on this matter have largely surfaced from prisoner Ameed Saeed al-Sheikh, who, in the words of The New York Times, said that "a hostility toward Islam coursed through much of the abuse." We've already heard of many abuses that would have been particularly offensive to Muslims, but it now appears that the guards may have deliberately chosen some of these methods because they're so offensive to Muslims. Some prisoners, press reports say, were "forced to renounce their religion."

Particuarly disconcerting is this testimony from al-Sheikh: "Someone else asked me, 'Do you believe in anything?' I said to him, 'I believe in Allah.' So he said, 'But I believe in torture, and I will torture you.'"...

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The Big Lab Experiment
Was our universe created by design?

..."You might take this all as a joke," he said, "but perhaps it is not entirely absurd. It may be the explanation for why the world we live in is so weird. On the evidence, our universe was created not by a divine being, but by a physicist hacker."

Linde's theory gives scientific muscle to the notion of a universe created by an intelligent being. It might be congenial to Gnostics, who believe that the material world was fashioned not by a benevolent supreme being but by an evil demiurge. More orthodox believers, on the other hand, will seek refuge in the question, "But who created the physicist hacker?" Let's hope it's not hackers all the way up.

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Kholood, a 2-year-old Iraqi girl, lies in a bed Sunday in the hospital in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, Iraq. Kholood was injured by shrapnel in her back when U.S. helicopters fired on a wedding party on May 19 in the desert near the border with Syria, killing more than 40 people. Kholood lost her parents, and four of her brothers and sisters during the attack.

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Show me the way home
Washington has earned a new sobriquet -- Sunni Triangle West. The mashing of molars and sharpening of knives is audible in the nation's capital as generals and civilian war hawks line up for the blame game. Contrary to Bush administration orders, the Rubicon is already well traversed.

From "failure is not an option" to "failure is now the only option" is the new message one hears in off-the-record think tank discussions with retired generals and former ranking Pentagon and CIA officials. The POW fiasco, with its global radioactive fallout, has left Operation Iraqi Freedom in intensive care....

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Hawks Eating Crow
The Bush Administration has not made it easy on its supporters. David Brooks now admits that he was gripped with a "childish fantasy" about Iraq. Tucker Carlson is "ashamed" and "enraged" at himself. Tom Friedman, admitting to being "a little slow," is finally off the reservation. Die-hard Republican publicist William Kristol admits of Bush, "He did drive us into a ditch." The neocon fantasist and sometime Republican speechwriter Mark Helprin complains on the Wall Street Journal editorial page--the movement's Pravda--of "the inescapable fact that the war has been run incompetently, with an apparently deliberate contempt for history, strategy, and thought, and with too little regard for the American soldier, whose mounting casualties seem to have no effect on the boastfulness of the civilian leadership."

Most of the regretful hawks blame the Administration for its failure to execute what they consider a noble endeavor. But it is a noble endeavor only in the way it would be noble to give all your money to one of those deposed Ethiopian princesses who fill your inbox with pleas to send them all your money for a guarantee of future riches. In other words, yes, while it might have been nice to liberate Iraq from Saddam's clutches, it was a lot more likely that under Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Co., we would end up arresting innocent people, holding them without trial and systematically torturing and sexually humiliating them; all the while saying, as the Daily Show's Rob Corddry so brilliantly put it, "Remember, it's not important that we did torture these people. What's important is that we are not the kind of people who would torture these people." ...

...And how pathetic is it that the only cable network really grappling with the media's failure is Comedy Central? Let's give the last word to the Daily Show's incomparable Stephen Colbert: "The journalists I know love America, but now all anybody wants to talk about is the bad journalists--the journalists that hurt America.... Who didn't uncover the flaws in our prewar intelligence? Who gave a free pass on the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection? Who dropped Afghanistan from the headlines at the first whiff of this Iraqi snipe hunt? The United States press corps, that's who."

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Red Planet Warming
Images Show Mars' Ice Caps Are Melting Fast

Dec. 7 — It might seem like the weather's getting warmer here on Earth, but Mars appears to have an even bigger global warming problem.

High-resolution images snapped by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor show that levels of frozen water and carbon dioxide at the Red Planet's poles have dwindled dramatically — by more than 10 feet — over a single Martian year (equivalent to 687 days or about two Earth years).

Michael Caplinger of San Diego's Malin Space Science Systems points out that if the warming were to continue at the same rate (that's a big "if"), Mars could become a nearly inhabitable place for people within 5,000 years or so....