Thursday 24 December 2009
[David] Brooks is a perfect example of the kind of spineless Beltway geek we always see beating the war drum at times like these. It’s because nebbishly little dorks like Brooks and Paul Wolfowitz and David Frum got their books dumped in high school that we end up dropping daisy cutters on Afghan sheep herds and shipping working class American kids halfway around the world to get their nuts blown off. That sounds like a simplistic explanation, but anyone who doesn’t have a keen ear for the pencil-pusher’s eternal quest for macho cred is going to have a hard time understanding Washington politics. Brooks’s columns have always been the easiest way to take the pulse of that particular dynamic, and it sure seems now that bureaucratic momentum for intervention and more intervention is re-inflating the chests of these Beltway generals. Matt Taibbi ☀
15 Signs American Society Is Coming Apart at the Seams ☀
You have a population of 50 million people who are in desperate need of money, they most likely have no health insurance and can’t afford to get health care or help of any kind. Part of this population probably also has loved ones who can’t get life sustaining medical treatments, or loved ones who have already died due to lack of costly medical treatment. The clock is ticking loud for these people and they are running out of options fast, and time delayed is time closer to death.
While the richest 1 percent have never had it so good, a significant percentage of the U.S. population now has firsthand experience in this. Millions upon millions of Americans are poor, broke, struggling, starving, desperate… and armed.
Christianity isn’t moving people’s lives today. What’s moving people’s lives is the stock market and the baseball scores. What are people excited about? It’s a totally materialistic level that has taken over the world. There isn’t even an ideal that anybody’s fighting for. Joseph Campbell ☀
Don’t be Stupid About Christmas ☀
1) The X in X-mas is not a serious issue, if it is for you, it may merely reveal an ignorance of Church History.
2) Jesus was not born on December 25. Seriously, He wasn’t.
3) The wise men did not show up at the manger scene. More than likely they showed up years later. They also did not smell like smoke, even though they “came from a fire.’”
4) Contrary to the scene on your coffee table, Jesus was probably not born in a stable. More than likely he was born in a house just like most kids.
Christmas is therefore a Christian holy day that, when understood properly in its Biblical context, offers indeed a great commemorative feast in stark contrast to the spun sugar of the Santa Claus myth. But it’s not a feast to everyone’s taste and certainly not everyone will be partaking of it this year. So let’s not talk as if everyone will. Wishing everyone indiscriminately a “Merry Christmas” is not, furthermore, honoring Christ. If Christians really want to “put Christ back into Christmas,” then we mustn’t spray “Merry Christmases” around town as if they were so many candies being flung from a Santa Claus Parade float. Save “Merry Christmas” for people who actually do focus on Christ, and wish everyone else a happy holiday, whatever it might be. John Stackhouse ☀
The Warriors: One of the Best Pure Action Movies Ever ☀
Walter Hill’s 1979 film The Warriors is a cult classic, a veteran of innumerable late-night cable showings and movie nights at your older brother’s friend’s house. It came out in 1979, was rereleased on DVD as a director’s cut in 2005, was turned into a video game by the makers of Grand Theft Auto the same year, and will be remade by Tony Scott for release in 2010. It’s a hyperstylized movie, based on a Sol Yurick novel that envisioned itself as a comic book rehash of Xenophon’s Anabasis, set in New York City.
Will Obama reverse the Pentagon’s mission creep? Without the military credentials, the president has been reluctant so far to take on the generals. Indeed, he has capitulated. During his West Point speech on Afghanistan on December 1, “Obama surrendered,” writes Tom Engelhardt. “It may not have looked like that: there were no surrender documents; he wasn’t on the deck of the USS Missouri; he never bowed his head. Still, from today on, think of him not as the commander-in-chief, but as the commanded-in-chief.” As the president reminded us in Oslo, he is a firm believer in the use of violent means to achieve noble ends. Despite his parenthetical invocation of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., the president doesn’t really take nonviolence seriously. Rather than just war doctrine, the president should instead draw inspiration from the peace churches, like Quakerism. John Feffer ☀
Wednesday 23 December 2009
American’s often judge George Washington harshly because he kept slaves. At least he looked into the eyes of his slaves. He knew their names. We here in American still have slaves, but we pretend we don’t because we don’t see them. We instead have sociopathic CEOs running our largest companies and political hacks like Tom Delay who lock OUR slaves away in overseas, unsafe, grimy factories, working under conditions that we would never inflict on our children or our neighbors. We haven’t ended slavery in the United States – we’ve merely exported it. And we should end it, while returning our jobs to America. We also need to invest in our infrastructure, and not just the obvious physical things like our old bridges and trains but more importantly our human infrastructure. Like most fully industrialized countries we must go back to times before Reagan ended free college in California and make it, at the very least, affordable again so our children aren’t graduating with the chains of decades of debt repayment around their necks. Thom Hartmann ☀
First, organize 1,000 ☀
I think the ability to find and organize 1,000 people is a breakthrough opportunity. One thousand people coordinating their actions is enough to change your world (and make a living.)
1,000 people each spending $1,000 on a special interest cruise equals a million dollars.
1,000 people willing to spend $250 to attend a day-long seminar gives you the leverage to invite just about anyone you can imagine to fly in and speak.
1,000 people voting as a bloc can change local politics forever.
1,000 people willing to try a new restaurant you find for them gives you the ability to make an entrepreneur successful and change the landscape of your town.
Even better, coordinating the learning and connections of this tribe of 1,000 is not just profitable, it’s rewarding. If you can take them where they want to go, you become indispensable (and respected).
The world you inhabit is the world you make. Your reputation precedes you, biasing the way new colleagues deal with you. Your first moves, friendly or hostile, tip the balance for future interactions. When you exhibit trust, you will most often find trustworthiness. When you are selfish, you will most often find selfishness. When you compete, others must resort to competition. If you choose to play the game strictly for your own advantage, your attempts at collaboration will indeed be, [as Thomas Hobbes said], “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Rod Wagner & Gale Muller ☀
Communities built cathedrals over generations. Usually, no one who worked on laying the building’s foundation was around when it was completed. The name of the cathedral was that of the town where it stood (for instance, Chartres Cathedral) or that of a biblical figure (Notre Dame for instance). A few egomaniacal popes (or bishops) aside, churches were not about their leaders but about the people who worshipped in them. There were religious orders in the Roman Catholic Church that bore the names of their founders, such as the Franciscans, but when those orders survived their founders, it was because they were folded into a hierarchical orderly structure. There were egomaniacal “saints” who drew attention to their “holiness” by public displays of self-mortification (the so-called Stylites, or “Pillar-Saints,” ascetics in the Byzantine Empire who stood on pillars preaching, exposed to the elements, while followers gathered around), but they performed their antics outside of churches. Such individualistic displays didn’t penetrate the liturgical practices led by largely anonymous priests. The North American evangelical/fundamentalist brand of Christianity is the religious version of the American civil religion: consumerist individualism. Today’s “Stylites” are more often found in private jets, but they still have followers who conflate holiness with success American style—in other words, as measured by money, possessions, numbers, and (above all) celebrity status. The consumer picks a pastor based on where the action seems to be: “Wow, you ought to hear our pastor!” Such “churches” are often founded by a man or woman who started them the way other men and women start a restaurant or a movie company. In Warren’s case, he is pastor of a church called Saddleback, but it’s more properly known as “Rick Warren’s church,” just as the Crystal Cathedral came to be known as “Robert Schuller’s church,” and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association has its founder’s name in the same way as the Ford Motor Company bears the name of its founder. Frank Schaeffer ☀
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