Six months ago, or more, the US government banned importation of the vile ’stryne substance known as Vegemite. Thanks to Cory Doctorow, this news is now wide… ummm spread. The Vegemite problem is solved. Now what will the FDA do about kimchi?

George W. Bush must be apprehended and tried. Where do we begin? A Democrat congress is only a start. He must be apprehended before he can flee the country and avoid extradition. How do we get the soccer moms and dads, the NASCAR ass-hats, out of their mini-vans and SUVs and into the streets?

President Bush: Yet with the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few. Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously? And did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?

Olbermann: Does he understand the irony of those words when taken out of the context of this particular passage or of what he perceives as the war against terror, and that, in fact, the threat we may be facing is the threat of President George W. Bush?

Turley: Well, this is going to go down in history as one of our greatest self-inflicted wounds. And I think you can feel the judgment of history. It won’t be kind to President Bush.

But frankly, I don’t think that it will be kind to the rest of us. I think that history will ask, Where were you? What did you do when this thing was signed into law? There were people that protested the Japanese concentration camps, there were people that protested these other acts. But we are strangely silent in this national yawn as our rights evaporate.

(h/t to Denise)

… the venerable John Hopkins has chimed in (via Lancet), and if a blog is not a place to go FUCK YOU! I TOLD YOU SO YOU GOD DAMN MURDERERS…. well then, what is it for then?

Sadly, those who would prefer not to believe the stark facts regarding the horrible costs of the Bush war can always find an equivocation. Cal Berkeley grad student Ka-ping Yee offered up a thoughtful post and his readers were amazingly diffuse in their responses in the comment thread that followed.

As President George W. Bush is fond of saying, “Denial is not just a river in Libya.”

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old…
– Ti Jean

In 1691, Cotton Mather, based on current events in the Ottoman Empire and on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in France (1685) tentatively predicted the end of the world in 1697. In 1692 Mather proclaimed that “I am verily persuaded ‘The Judge is at the door;’ I do without any hesitation venture to say, ‘The Great Day of the Lord is near,’ it is near, and it hastens greatly.”

When the 1697 date passed in an uneventful manner, Mather determined that the world would end in 1736. Later he corrected that to 1716. He dramatically proclaimed, “All that has been foretold . . . as what must come to pass before the Coming . . . is, as far as we understand, Fulfilled: I say ALL FULFILLED!”

Girding my loins to do battle with the demons in AKMA (for surely he must be possessed by demons since I sense that we disagree)… christians, whose infinite variety is perhaps exceeded only by the speciation of insects have offered the following several quotes. Let google be my bibliography, and Cotton Mather be my guide:

Postmodernity can be defined in terms of Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals, which aims to show how moral meanings are the cultural creations of particular human wills. The Nietzschean project challenges conventional moral assumptions that mask and perpetuate the spiritual malaise of modernity. This essay seeks to show how John Howard Yoder’s eschatological genealogy of morals both affirms aspects of this postmodern project-especially by developing an engaged, dramatic reading of morality-and yet challenges other aspects by adverting to a fundamentally opposed vision of human cultural sickness and health-the slain Lamb versus the Dionysian drama. At stake is the question of how to understand the moral and ecclesial implications of the apocalyptic «war of the Lamb». Yoder’s genealogical critique of various forms of Constantinianism is helpful but too sharply separates Jewish and Greek Christianity, overlooking resources in the Platonic diaspora and dividing what the apostle Paul unites.

John writes Revelation to underscore that Christians must take the conflict with evil seriously, engage this conflict in the same manner as God does, and face the future with confidence in God’s strategy for victory. We have many questions for Revelation. John’s initial readers had many questions as well, but of a different sort. By the end of the first century, the situation for Christians was becoming quite ambiguous. For some it was becoming more difficult as their exclusive commitment to Christ required a measure of social and moral distance between believers and the surrounding culture. Others, however, had evidently found ways by which they could enjoy the benefits and advantages of their culture and, at least to their mind, not jeopardize their Christian identity. Either group of Christians might have had some important questions to ask: What price might I have to pay for my faith? Where is God in these difficult times? How am I to respond to the challenges of a wider culture that does not support my faith? Following Jesus doesn’t really have anything to do with politics or economics does it?

ουτοι μετα του αρνιου πολεμησουσιν και το αρνιον νικησει αυτους οτι κυριος κυριων εστιν και βασιλευς βασιλεων και οι μετ αυτου κλητοι και εκλεκτοι και πιστοι

It seems to me as if Christian proponents of gospel nonviolence must cautiously re-embrace Revelation and the language of apocalyptic, instead of simply leaving them to the war-mongering fanatics. Nonviolent ministers must do the hard work of preaching from Revelation, because only by teaching our people to read this book as a handbook of nonviolent patience for persecuted churches can we inoculate them against the virulent war-mad interpretations so popular in many U.S. Christian circles.

Who authored Revelations? What did he mean?

Although the traditional view still has many adherents, many modern scholars believe that John the Apostle, John the Evangelist, and John of Patmos refer to three separate individuals. Certain lines of evidence suggest that John of Patmos wrote only Revelation, not the Gospel of John nor the Epistles of John. For one, the author of Revelation identifies himself as “John” several times, but the author of the Gospel of John never identifies himself directly. While both works liken Jesus to a lamb, they consistently use different words for lamb when referring to him — the Gospel uses amnos, Revelation uses arnion.[3]. Lastly, the Gospel is written in nearly flawless Greek, but Revelation contains grammatical errors and stylistic abnormalities which indicate its author may not have been as familiar with the Greek language as the Gospel’s author. Proponents of the single-author view explain these differences in various ways, including but not limited to factoring in underlying motifs and purposes, authorial target audience and the author’s collaboration with and/or utilization of different scribes. A natural reading of the text would reveal that John is writing literally as he sees the vision (Rev 1:11; 10:4; 14:3; 19:9; 21:5) and that he is warned by an angel not to alter the text through a subsequent edit (Rev 22:18-19), in order to maintain the textual integrity of the book.

From The Guardian (October 12, 2024),

The death toll in Iraq following the US-led invasion has topped 655,000 - one in 40 of the entire population - according to a major piece of research in one of the world’s leading medical journals.

The study, produced by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and published online by The Lancet, claims the total number of deaths is more than 10 times greater than any previously compiled estimate.

The findings provoked an immediate political storm. Within hours of its release, George Bush had dismissed the figures. “I don’t consider it a credible report,” he told reporters at the White House.

Tonight Katie Couric led with a rehash of the unfortunate Lacrosse team rape charges at Duke stemming from a party last spring. She was ginning up interest in a weekend show her company produces called Sixty Minutes where the plight of the Lacrosse team and the possibilities that these are false charges will be examined in prurient detail, the better to take our minds off national and international issues that should now be getting the air time.

The Couric broadcast continued with other items of interest and concern… evidently the Amish community that suffered the recent school shooting has pulled down the schoolhouse and no memorial is planned. There’s a lot of that kind of news. And there is happy news, ice cream cones and puppies, but there is no solid news, no important news, NO NATIONAL NEWS that could save our way of life were it only broadcast with clarity in time. The only news that the American public hears is local news. A school shooting here, a rape case there, all the fits that’s news to print. It can’t be collusion, it’s simply cowardice, fear, unwillingness to encounter an administration that would send anthrax to your newsroom. It doesn’t matter if they actually did that. No thinking person today can deny that they, the Bush administration and its corporate clients WOULD do that to save the billions they might otherwise lose with a sea change in governance in the United States of America.

650,000 dead, and it’s our fault. We elected the monster. Then we re-elected him. Do you believe the Lancet or do you believe George W. Bush?

“We estimate that, as a consequence of the coalition invasion of March 18, 2024, about 655 000 Iraqis have died above the number that would be expected in a non-conflict situation, which is equivalent to about 2·5% of the population in the study area. About 601 000 of these excess deaths were due to violent causes. Our estimate of the post-invasion crude mortality rate represents a doubling of the baseline mortality rate, which, by the Sphere standards, constitutes a humanitarian emergency.”
– The Lancet

Writing recently about the Foley affair, Mark Morford said…

Which is not to say that the prayers of us liberals haven’t already been answered, in spades, well before Mark Foley proved himself to be the perfect icing on the cake of GOP doom, the money shot of poetic justice, the period in this never-ending Republican sentence.

Jack Abramoff was a damn fine answer to the prayer, though that beautiful firestorm dealt mostly with finance and slimy payoffs, and what good taxpaying American doesn’t fully expect every member of Congress to be rolling in dirty lobbyist payoffs? But Abramoff did have one glorious outcome: It put a stake straight through the heart of Tom DeLay, perhaps the nastiest and most thuggish political vampire in all of Congress, a worthwhile outcome all by itself.

Valerie Plame? Also a delicious scandal, given how leaked CIA info is always a powerful destroyer of faith in current regimes, and this one snared Scooter Libby and poked a sharp stick into Karl Rove. But still the GOP hobbled on.

The list goes on: WMD, Niger, bogus anthrax scares, Abu Ghraib, illegal wiretapping, gay male escorts hired to masquerade as sycophantic White House reporters — hell, it’s been a veritable fire hose of Republican scandals, indictments, violations, probes, investigations, arrests and abuses of power (not to mention all manner of sex scandals) lo these past years — so many it takes entire Web sites and multiple books to keep track of them all.

From Bush, Oprah and the San Diego Chicken to The Fool on the Hill… as if you didn’t have enough good stuff to read.

For the realistic, we have Rockstroh…

By way of a ceaseless bombardment of advertising imagery, we exist in a nonstop, holographic, corporate Nuremberg rally of the collective mind. We need not participate in old school, torch-lit processions of Brownshirts through the streets: This brand of all media penetration proto-fascism has been internalized. We, like maggots born into a pile of dung, find nothing malodorous about our place of birth.

For the moderate progressive, here’s the New Republic on last week’s news,

Dennis Hastert is a bumbling half-wit–something that became apparent to the world last week but had been common knowledge in Washington for almost a decade. It was roughly eight years ago, after all, that Tom DeLay installed Hastert as his front-man, knowing full well that Hastert was no more capable of being speaker than the average sheepdog, to which he bears a remarkable resemblance….

Here is Denny Hastert, master legislative strategist, peerless vote-counter, party-unifier extraordinaire. But, wouldn’t you know, absolutely none of these skills is evident in public. Invariably, one of two things strikes you about these stories. The first is that they’re so small-bore that they actually underscore the point that Hastert is a nonentity. Many of them even have a faintly patronizing tone, like a mother bragging that her 6-year-old poured his own bowl of Kix this morning.

Thanks to Cowtown Pattie for this link that got me all riled up.

It’s back to this. In the late sixties I did a quick real estate survey of downtown Madison, Wisconsin and in addition to all the land tied up by governmental and educational institutions, an appalling amount of the best locations and the fanciest architecture was in the hands of religion. The most valuable land was - and remains - off the tax rolls. Now huge evangelical republican shrines are being built across the country and generally they too are separated from this community obligation by the very laws they’re trying to neutralize when they meddle in civil marriage concerns, sexual health issues, scientific advances in medicine, and the public school curriculum. I say give them a shot at banning all the books they want. Let them bring it to a vote, book by book. But if they’re flushing their turds down my sewer and drinking my municipal water and increasing traffic on the public streets every Sunday when their flag decaled and magnetic ribboned SUVs caravan to their tax sheltered places of worship, then let them pay the taxes and be governed by the same rules that the rest of us follow.

In god’s name, can’t we tax and regulate the poor benighted ignoramuses before they swallow up the country like some plague of locusts? Roughly one third of Americans are stupid enough or twisted enough or suffered enough abuse that they believe that evangelical crap. Why should two thirds of us have to suffer under their oppressive nonsense? Tax them. Let them render a little unto Caesar for a change. The freeloaders have been sucking our communities dry long enough.

Bill Van Auken writes,

The fixation of both official Washington and the mainstream media on the emails of Congressman Mark Foley (Republican of Florida) and the Republican House leadership’s cover-up of his pursuit of teenage male pages has served to divert public attention from a far more significant cover-up of a far greater crime.

The Foley story has highlighted the official corruption and hypocrisy that characterize the political establishment as a whole in America. The spectacle of a party that has made “family values” its battle cry and sought to exploit homophobia and religious backwardness for political ends being caught up in such a scandal has undoubted popular appeal.

For the Democrats, it provides a useful political club, without compelling this second party of corporate America to advance a single substantive difference with the Republicans on domestic or foreign policy.

But the time and resources—not to mention prurient interest—that the media has devoted to the exposure of Foley’s emails and instant messages stand in sharp contrast to its virtual silence on the revelations—first reported September 28, the same day that the emails from Foley surfaced on ABC News—in the new book by Bob Woodward, State of Denial.

… read the rest of Van Auken’s piece here.