Neko Case - Maybe Sparrow (Letterman)

Neko Case - Furnace Room Lullabye

Be Good Tanyas

Joseph Arthur - Redemption's Son

Strangely Appealing

Joseph Arthur - Smile that Explodes

War Quotes

'This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.'

~Plato

'Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man has a right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has quarrel with mine, although I have none with him?'

~Blaise Pascal

'Force always attracts men of low morality.'

~Albert Einstein

'Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.'

~Albert Einstein

'What an immense mass of evil must result...from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen.'

~Leo Tolstoy

'The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.'

~Leo Tolstoy

'We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening...'

~Leo Tolstoy

'In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.'

~Leo Tolstoy

'Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right.'

~H.L. Mencken

'The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.'

~H. L. Mencken

'Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.'

~Sir Peter Ustinov

'The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.'

~Marie Beyle

'Don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with...'

~Gerard K. O'Neill

'War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.'

~General Smedley Butler

'After every ''victory'' you have more enemies.'

~Jeanette Winterson

'Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.'

~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

'The worst crimes were dared by a few, willed by more and tolerated by all.'

~Tacitus

'I am not blaming those who are resolved to rule, only those who show an even greater readiness to submit.'

~Thucydides

'It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.'

~Albert Camus

'Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.'

~Noam Chomsky

'War is the unfolding of miscalculations.'

~Barbara Tuchman

'Dulce bellum inexpertis (War is delightful to the inexperienced).'

~Erasmus

'War is not a word, it's an acronym for "Wasting Another's Resources."'

~Ramman Kenoun

'A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over...is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.'

~G. K. Chesterton

'Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.'

~George Washington

(Stolen from here, where there are many more.)

http://antiwar.com/quotes.php

The Root of All Evil? Part I (Richard Dawkins)

War News Radio

http://warnewsradio.org/

War News Radio

"War News Radio is a production of Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, USA. Our weekly, 29-minute program is currently carried on numerous radio stations worldwide and is available for free public broadcast."

Robert Newman History of oil

The World According To Bush

The World According To Bush 2004

From a Wired interview with Stephen Colbert.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/colbert.html

Be an Expert on Anything

PICK A FIELD THAT CAN'T BE VERIFIED. Try something like string theory or God’s will: “I speak to God. I’m sorry that you can’t also.” Security experts are in this category: They have security clearances, we don’t. We can’t question the expertise of the NSA because we are not in the NSA.

CHOOSE A SUBJECT THAT'S ACTUALLY SECRET. Dan Brown invented a secret subject for The Da Vinci Code, so now he is forever an expert on this secret subject that no one can challenge. Anybody who attacks the secret subject is, by definition, part of the cabal.

GET YOUR OWN ENTRY IN AN ENCYCLOPEDIA. In the media age, everybody was famous for 15 minutes. In the Wikipedia age, everybody can be an expert in five minutes. Special bonus: You can edit your own entry to make yourself seem even smarter.

USE THE WORD ZEITGEIST AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE. Ideally, you want to find words that sound familiar but people don’t really know their definitions: zeitgeist, bildungsroman, doppelgänger – better yet, anything Latin. But avoid paradigm. It’s so 1994. If you say the word paradigm, everybody knows you’re a poser.

BE SURE TO USE LOTS OF ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS. Someone who says the words operations security may be educated, but the person who uses the military abbreviation Opsec is clearly an expert. If I use the term Gitmo, that means I’ve actually been there. If you say, “We’re going to Defcon 1,” it means you probably have the launch codes. Real experts don’t have time for extra syllables.

SPEAK FROM THE BALLS, NOT FROM THE DIAPHRAGM. In the expert game, you’ve got to have sack. That means speaking with confidence. In America, you’ve got to steer clear of nuance and ambivalence – and don’t even contemplate doubt.

DON'T BE AFRAID TO MAKE THINGS UP. Never fear being exposed as a fraud. Experts make things up all the time. They’re qualified to.

DON'T LIMIT YOURSELF TO CURRENT KNOWLEDGE. If you worry too much about being up-to-date, you miss out on vast territories of obsolete knowledge just waiting to be reclaimed. Think of leech-craft and all the lonely experts in the use of the little creatures, which are now experiencing a renaissance in health care.

GET AN HONORARY PHD. They work wonders. I have a doctorate in fine arts from Knox College in Illinois. All I did was give a speech, and now everybody has to call me Dr. Colbert.

MAKE A HABIT OF NAME-DROPPING. Say things like “I was talking to John Hockenberry yesterday for my story in Wired. Have you seen my cover?” I plan to use this issue of Wired to assert that I now know everything about wires.

BE FAMOUS. IT HELPS.

The Spin

City of God

'Because I do it with one small ship, I am called a terrorist. You do it with a whole fleet and are called an emperor.'

~A pirate, from St. Augustine's "City of God"

54-40 I Go Blind

Andrew Bird - Measuring Cups Live

Andrew Bird, Live!

Zionist Christians

Certainly, some of the most visible and troubling manifestations of racism in society's recent memory has involved anti-Semitism. Simply put, the Jewish people have put up with a lot of nasty discrimination over the last two millenia; much of it with Christian roots.

Having said that, the Zionist movement itself has been accused of racism towards Arabs. This charge has been made mostly by Muslem nations, in different colourful and dramatic ways. They try and get this message out, but the empathy has not been pouring in. Its hard for me not to agree with them; at the very least I think that one would have to admit a strong potential for this sort of racism in Zionism, if not its actual presence.

But then many people don't see this at all. God gave them (the Jewish people) that land, so the Arab squatters, who have been squatting there a long time now, can just go find a new home. There's a line from a Roger Waters' song that seems appropriate here; 'What God wants, God gets; God help us all'.

Things are already ugly and ethically complicated, but it gets even worse. This brings us to what has to be the biggest group supporting the Zionist dream, and that would be Zionist Christians. Those familiar with the eschatology of conservative Christianity will know what lies at the heart of all this. For those who don't, let me explain.

First of all, eschatology is the branch of theology concerned with the end of the world. Conservative Christians have some interesting ideas about this, based on their reading of Revelation. Well, actually, they are quite childish ideas. They, the born again believers, will be whisked off to heaven (the rapture) while the rest of us nonbelievers scratch our heads trying to figure out where our very religious neigbours and family members wandered off to. Then a series of very nasty things will happen to us (the tribulation) while they are forced to gleefully watch. They've warned us about this countless times; it could happen any day now.

Now, I don't keep up with all the details, and perhaps some of them have changed recently. Hal Lindsay's books no longer make much sense, so perhaps they've been busy reinterpreting Revelation in the light of the present political landscape, as is their custom. Regardless, Zionist Christians supported, and continue to support the state of Isreal for one reason; to usher on the end of the world. And they're growing restless.

Mohammed on Christianity

Islam has an interesting tradition when it comes to its views on Christianity. I would imagine most Christians would find them somewhat bizarre.

As I understand it, this is a brief overview of the Moslem position on Jesus. The virgin birth is accepted, Christ is the second greatest prophet (after Mohammed of course), Christ was not the son of God, nor was he 'literally' crucified, although it appeared as such. To me, the interesting question isn't whether the Muslims are right or not, but how these ideas formed and their original sources. I haven't found a good book explaining this, but looking at the puzzle pieces, I think I can make a reasonable conjecture. Of course, I think all my conjecture is reasonable, so take it with a grain of salt.

It seems to me that some of Islam's ideas are quite similar to Gnostic interpretations. I would think that Mohammed must have come into contact with different heterodox forms of Christianity in his travels, and in particular, Gnostic Christian groups. A strong similarity can certainly be seen with what the Koran says about the crucifixion. It appeared that Jesus was crucified, but this is not what happened. The exact same thing is said in some of the gnostic writings.

'Wherefore he did not himself suffer death, but Simon, a certain man of Cyrene, being compelled, bore the cross in his stead; so that this latter being transfigured by him, that he might be thought to be Jesus, was crucified, through ignorance and error, while Jesus himself received the form of Simon, and, standing by, laughed at them.'

This is Irenaeus quoting a bit of Basilides, an early Gnostic. You find something very similar in the Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter. In other gnostic texts the solution is similar, but not quite so extreme. For the most part, Gnostic's rejected Christ's humanity, because of their views on matter, and this meant different approaches towards what the crucifixion was or meant.

Within Islam is the notion that the books of the New Testament have been edited over time, and as such, the original meanings of the books have been lost, or at least have a spurious nature. I'm sure this view would not have been hard to come by among Gnostic circles as well. Or even some other heterodox form of Christianity.

Mohammed makes mention, and rejects, the doctrine of the Trinity, so perhaps there was contact with Orthodox Christianity as well. Of course, I have no idea which forms of Christianity Mohammed came into contact with, but approaching it objectively, I think certain conclusions could be drawn. Unfortunately, in doing so, you might be offending the nature of the sacred scriptures of both groups. Still, it's far to interesting to think that no one has even bothered to try.

The Politics of Christianity: Elaine Pagels

"The kind of Christianity that pervades the religious right in this country divides the world between the saved and the damned, between God's people and Satan's people, between good and evil. We have all seen how this is played out in our politics. I used to think that President Bush was using this language as a political ploy. I still think he is, but I also think—to my disappointment—that he also believes it. His conviction that he is God's chosen one to "rid the world of evildoers" blinds him to the evil that he—and we, as Americans—are capable of doing. The conviction that we are on the side of good—of God—is, however, an ancient one—enormously powerful.

Christians invoking terms such as "evil-doers" read the bible, as anyone does, selectively. They choose the parts they like and they leave out the parts they don't. In this case the parts they like are the parts about an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, that is—and a life for a life. If someone's taken a life, then their life is required. And that's certainly a biblical tenet. Of course, it's from the Old Testament. You don't hear much about forgiveness and turning the other cheek from our President and his administration. The Old Testament is what they choose for this occasion because it suits their purpose.

What I've learned through studying the Gospel of Thomas and the context of the politics of early Christianity, is that anyone who participates in Christian tradition without having learned anything about it—and that's most people who participate in it, because it's not taught in public or private schools for the most part—often think of their traditions as immutable, as if they've just come down from God."

Read the whole article here. Elaine Pagels well known for her books on early Christianity and Gnosticism; it is quite interesting to read her contrast of this to modern American politics.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pagels03/pagels_index.html

Malm

Theologian Quiz

You scored as Paul Tillich. Paul Tillich sought to express Christian truth in an existentialist way. Our primary problem is alienation from the ground of our being, so that our life is meaningless. Great for psychotherapy, but no longer very influential.


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