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"Yes, Jesus did, as Paul says, die for our sins, but his whole agenda of dealing with sin and all its..."

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:26:51 +0000

“Yes, Jesus did, as Paul says, die for our sins, but his whole agenda of dealing with sin and all its effects and consequences was never about rescuing individual souls from the world but about saving humans so that they could become part of his project of saving the world. “My kingdom is not from this world,” he said to Pilate; had it been, he would have led an armed resistance movement like other worldly kingdom-prophets. But the kingdom he brought was emphatically for this world, which meant and means that God has arrived on the public stage and is not about to leave it again; he has thus defeated the forces both of tyranny and of chaos—both of shrill modernism and of fluffy postmodernism, if you like—and established in their place a rule of restorative, healing justice, which needs translating into scholarly method if the study of the Gospels is to do proper historical, theological and political justice to the subject matter.”

- N.T. Wright

"Between the early 1930s and the early 1970s, the American social experiment was shaped by a moral..."

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:41:51 +0000

“Between the early 1930s and the early 1970s, the American social experiment was shaped by a moral vision that was virtually the obverse of everything Glenn Beck and the Tea Party movement subscribes to. Lets call it the social justice movement. There were three parts to the program: religious, economic and (in the later stages) racial. The religion was liberal, moral and ecumenical. The economic program was New Deal orthodoxy. By the 1950s, ridding the world of Jim Crow apartheid had become the movement’s primary goal. Picture liberal Protestant clergymen, radical Roman Catholic priests and Jewish Rabbis marching arm-in-arm with Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy and you’ve got the idea. The civil rights movement couldn’t have succeeded without this movement. As every white southerner realized, it took progressive rulings from the Supreme Court, progressive legislation from Congress and powerful intervention from the White House and the Justice Department to drive Jim Crow to his knees. In short, it took the government.”

- Glenn Beck, the voice of white resentment

"In a study released this year by the Archives of General Psychiatry, researchers concluded that..."

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:54:51 +0000

“In a study released this year by the Archives of General Psychiatry, researchers concluded that antidepressant use in America has almost doubled in a ten-year period. That’s an increase from about 13.3 million to 27 million people taking prescribed medication for symptoms of depression. During that same period pharmaceutical companies increased direct-to-consumer advertising spending from $32 million to $122 million. In light of these numbers it could be argued that advertisers have managed to sell the idea of depression – and its attendant cure – to an easily swayed public. And while that may explain part of the increase, it can’t account for all of it. It’s difficult to deny that a pall of sadness and anxiety has fallen over modern life. Maybe it’s the stress of living in these hard economic times; maybe it’s the chemicals in the air, the additives in the food or the pollutants in the air we all breathe. Or maybe it’s the distance, physical and psychological, that is rapidly growing between us. As the world is gripped by rampant health scares and communication is increasingly mediated through screens, we’re becoming unwilling, and perhaps unable, to simply reach out and touch one another. And if we lose that fundamental element of our emotional language, there’s no pill in the world that will soothe the existential ache.”

- Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters

Bring it on, Ayn Rand geeks

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:08:51 +0000

Bring it on, Ayn Rand geeks:

It is merciful, perhaps, that Buckley did not live to see the detested Ayn Rand become the central intellectual figure on the right. Until recently the only prominent conservative known to have been influenced at one point by the Evita of the nerds was Alan Greenspan, and he was given a pass for a youthful indiscretion. Now two of the stars of the emergent right, Ron Paul and Paul Ryan, are professed disciples of the Mary Baker Eddy of egotism. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” Ryan told a convention of Randians in 2005. Ron Paul named his son Rand Paul.

Glenn Beck, another rising star on the right, sounds Randian in his denunciation of the idea of Christian social justice as misleading progressive propaganda. It was Rand’s hatred of religion and her praise of selfishness that irked Buckley and the movement conservatives, who were more concerned about preserving what they saw as Western civilization from communism and relativism than with creating a free-market utopia.

All of this is great news for American progressivism. In the last third of the 20th century, many liberals who supported New Deal economic policies defected to the right on the basis of the Cold War or the culture war. Now that the Cold War and the culture war are over, what remains is the class war. And in the class war, the libertarians are on the side of the classes.

"One presumes, by the way, that those who say we have a republic not a democracy seem to wish to be..."

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:23:50 +0000

“One presumes, by the way, that those who say we have a republic not a democracy seem to wish to be emphasizing that we have representative government. However, it is unclear as to what point such an observation is supposed to be making, given that all democracies, save the hypothetical, are representative democracies. And, again, since republicanism, (properly defined) is about where power comes from and not anything about how government is chosen and to whom it is responsible, the formulation of “republic not democracy” is incomplete at best and nonsensical at worse. In short, a republic really isn’t a specific regime type, while a democracy is. Moreover, to have a democracy, one essentially has to have a republican basis for it–unless one has a constitutional monarchy, at which point one could start to split theoretical and definitional hairs. I will leave that alone for the moment, as my main focus in the US.”

- PoliBlog

Tim Berners-Lee: The year open data went worldwide

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:22:51 +0000

Tim Berners-Lee: The year open data went worldwide

"I really enjoyed reading McKnight’s review of ANKOC and your response. I think its the kind of..."

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:24:51 +0000

“I really enjoyed reading McKnight’s review of ANKOC and your response. I think its the kind of debate that we see so little of in Christianity today; opposite viewpoints which are nonetheless capable of engaging each other with civility. What struck me about McKnight’s review is he goes back to orthodoxy as the focal point for evangelicalism. Fair enough, but there’s something I’ve always found strange about the evangelical emphasis on orthodoxy as a fixed truth throughout the ages. Obviously, evangelicalism is itself an offshoot of the Protestant Reformation of the 1500’s. The Reformation wasn’t just about problems with the Catholic Church, but about a new way of understanding our relationship with God. Luther’s true radicalism wasn’t his break with the Catholic Church but his revolutionary teachings about grace and our relationship with God. When evangelicals talk about “a personal relationship with Jesus” they owe this to the spirit of revolution and upheaval of the Reformation. The Reformation shook the orthodoxy of the previous 1400 years in the same kind of way the “emerging” church is currently doing. So it strikes me that evangelicals can’t talk about a consistent orthodoxy, because what Christians consider “orthodox” is always changing and evolving, and they themselves are a part of that.”

- Responses: A New Kind of Christianity … on revolutionary Evangelicalism

Steve Sack

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:23:50 +0000

Steve Sack

We pay to create health problems

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:23:50 +0000

We pay to create health problems:

Even while our government is struggling to find ways to cover the costs of diabetes drugs and supplies—which typically cost between $3,000 and $5,000 for just one person with diabetes each year—it also pays out massive subsidies to the sugar industry. Junk food is made more affordable, and diabetes risk skyrockets.

Even as we seek to cover the cost of cholesterol-lowering drugs—one Lipitor pill costs about $5—our government also subsidies the production of high-cholesterol meat and cheese products.

As we gear up to help uninsured families get coverage for their children, government contracts ensure that school lunches are loaded with high-fat fare. More than 80 percent of schools serve too much high-fat food to comply with the federal government’s own nutrition guidelines.

"Vision is incompatible with church community. The vision and mission statement talk is very..."

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 07:23:50 +0000

“Vision is incompatible with church community. The vision and mission statement talk is very provocative and tempting. As soon as anyone questions what our purpose is, it has the immediate and alluring aura of imagining, creating and shaping our future. It’s called futuring. And it is very sexy. If you are a business or an influence or lobby group or club or even a charity or anything else, you will need to have a vision and articulate a mission statement. But not a church. People, even believers, must have the freedom to assemble without being required to serve a vision created by the pastor or the leaders or even the collective. Otherwise their personal freedom out of necessity is sublimated. You have a choice: you either serve a vision or you serve people. The church can’t do both.”

- nakedpastor

"In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of..."

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:50:50 +0000

“In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism. In a sensible country, Obama would be able to clearly define this project without fear of offending the people he needs to get legislation passed. But we don’t live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office.”

- David Brooks

bartcop.com

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:43:06 +0000

bartcop.com

Excerpts From the New Texas History Textbooks

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:40:54 +0000

Excerpts From the New Texas History Textbooks:

Study Questions:

1). When the FDR Memorial opened in 1997 near the Tidal Basin in Washington, successful protests by liberal activist groups led to the removal of Roosevelt’s cigarette holder from his statue and also had his wife, Eleanor, depicted without her trademark fur coat. Explain other ways that liberal pressure groups distort history today.

2). Discuss, based on your own life experience, whether Ivy League-educated bureaucrats in Washington understand how real Americans live and the values they cherish.

3). Compare the questionable legislative tactics used by Roosevelt in the passage of the Emergency Banking Act with the techniques employed by President Barack Obama in 2010 to try to pass his health care reform bill.

"The consequences, even in creating unneeded services and products for the sheer sake of growth, even..."

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:38:57 +0000

“The consequences, even in creating unneeded services and products for the sheer sake of growth, even pointless are enormously profitable. For example, water, is bottled at a cost of a few cents and sold for a buck. Much of it is just bottled water from a municipal source. The consumer has already paid for such water twice, once in taxes and again as a utility bill, but nevertheless buys bottled at a little over 10,000 times the municipal cost. Of course not all of that difference is profit. Some of it goes into petroleum based polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, boosting the oil industry and contributing one third of our national waste stream. Bottle production and bottle recycling both pollute our water supply, helping push us to that day we will all eventually be forced to buy bottled water. Until then, our commodity fetishism will suffice; we can buy “Boulder Water,” bottled tap water from Boulder, Colorado, at 11,000 times the cost of the tap water, because, well, it’s from Boulder. The glories of commodity capitalist productivity!”

- Joe Bageant

Listen Up, Progressives: Talk Radio Matters

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:37:00 +0000

Listen Up, Progressives: Talk Radio Matters:

Did you know that when the White House and members of the media mention ”code words like ‘diversity’ and ‘equality’” what they are really proposing is “communist revolution?”

Did you know that Osama bin Laden’s remarks about global warming are almost identical to “those of the average, run-of-the-mill leftist, like Obama or Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi or the entire Democrat Party?” Or that the “global warming scam” is “an effort by the left to destroy capitalist economies?”

Here’s one I’ll bet you didn’t know: President Barack Obama was “advised by [the] Ft. Hood Shooter.”

If you didn’t know the “facts” above, it means you probably haven’t been spending your time listening to talk radio hosts such as Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Neil Boortz, and G. Gordon Liddy. It’s hard work listening to these shows, but progressives should be paying attention to the impact they’re having: 48 million people get their news from these guys, according to the Pew Project For Excellence In Journalism, and the numbers of radio stations that carry at least some talk shows grew to 2,056 from 1,370 the year before, according to Inside Radio magazine.

That’s more than twice the collective audience for the three TV network evening news shows combined, more than five times the audience of the three network Sunday news shows, nearly seven times the combined audience for cable news shows, nearly 10 times the audience for NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” and 16 times the audience for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

"If we are serious about our desire to share space, share life together, and participate in God’s new..."

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:35:05 +0000

“If we are serious about our desire to share space, share life together, and participate in God’s new creation, then we must seriously reconsider our understanding of and relationship to private property. Indeed, the more I study the Bible and economics, the more I am convinced that private property is at the core of many of the problems we face and is, itself, a fundamentally anti-Christian belief and practice.”

- the Jesus Manifesto

"The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of..."

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:32:53 +0000

“The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy.”

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife is launching a ‘tea party’ group. Virginia Thomas says,..."

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:30:51 +0000

“Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife is launching a ‘tea party’ group. Virginia Thomas says, “I am an ordinary citizen from Omaha, Neb., who just may have the chance to preserve liberty along with you and other people like you,” She claims to be energized by President Obama’s “hard-left agenda.” She’s accepting donations from various sources — including corporations — as allowed under campaign finance rules recently loosened and supported by her husband’s Supreme Court decision opening the floodgates to groups like this the Citizens United case. Hey–it’s “all in the family” at the Justice Thomas household. And just for the record, Virginia is no ordinary activist. Being the the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas should test the traditional notions of political impartiality for the court, although for Virginia Thomas this isn’t the first time. In 2000, when her husband’s Court accepted George Bush’s lawsuit to block the Florida Supreme Court’s order that all the votes in the state of Florida be counted – a count done a year later by a newspaper consortium which found that Al Gore actually won more votes in that state – the day after Clarence Thomas blocked the vote count, Virginia Thomas, working at the Heritage Foundation, was sending out emails to vet potential members of the Bush administration. This was weeks before her husband’s court illegally decided that Bush had won the election because her husband’s court effectively blocked the counting of all the votes in Florida.”

- Thom Hartmann

Monte Wolverton

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:42:52 +0000

Monte Wolverton

Tumblr Queue Askew Anew

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:33:00 +0000

Apologies for flooding the dashboards of my fellow Tumblr-ists.

My queue interval of 45 minutes (during non-peak times, set to 2-3 hours) was reset to 2 hours, but it appears that a post is being flushed out every few minutes.

I wonder what the snafu is in the process (I used to be paid large sums of coin for performing this kind of root cause analysis and resultant code modifications to resolve). Maybe multiple processes concurrently hammering each other. Or interference from another batch process or daemon, that unsuspectedly resets timer intervals, along with hammering blog preferences.