Support our troops?

This morning, my grandfather sent me an email “action alert” from the American Family Association urging protest of the recent Berkeley, California City Council resolution that declared the downtown Marine recruiting office “unwanted” and urged the recruiters to leave town. This article does not respond to that issue, but rather to the subject line of [...]

Guest article: America the Fascist

My friend Steven Kippel wrote this post, and I requested permission to reproduce it here. Just so no one who has a loved one involved with the military will hear this the wrong way, my brother is in the last stages of mission training before going to Iraq - so this is quite a personal [...]

New article at Catapult

This morning the new issue of Catapult Magazine went live today, including my article “(In)Security and the Fall“.
I briefly re-viewed Eve Ensler’s excellent book Insecure at Last, casting her concern about security and the strange phenomenon of how cultures that focus strongly on security tend to be fundamentally insecure in light of the Biblical story [...]

Bush, Pakistan and the Bomb

This article from today’s International Herald Tribune gives an excellent example of what Chalmers Johnson calls “blowback”, from the title of his 2000 book (revised ed. 2004) Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, in which he essentially predicted a 9/11-like attack as one of the “unintended consequences” of American policy towards so-called “developing [...]

Orwell Rolls in His Grave

A documentary exploration into how the Media is anti-democratic.

The War on Democracy

I’m sorry for the recent lack of content, things have been pretty busy lately (surprise, surprise). I’ve been meaning to make a theological post and it just hasn’t happened yet. I have some thoughts on dominion and Genesis 1 I’d really like to flesh out.
In the meantime, enjoy filmmaker John Pilger’s masterful documentary showing how, [...]

Internet cut in Myanmar, blogger presses on - from CNN

Internet cut in Myanmar, blogger presses on - CNN.com
From the story: According to The Associated Press, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Friday he believes the loss of life in Myanmar has been “far greater” than is being reported.
A Burgundy Revolution? - Time
While the official government-released death toll is 9, witness claim as many as [...]

The obligatory 9/11 post

I wasn’t going to do this, I was just going to let the post about Stirling Bridge stand as my statement about 9/11, but I just wrote this for my Livejournal and thought it was worth sharing here.
“Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, [...]

a couple of good articles

School’s keeping me crazy busy and probably will continue doing so until finals are over next week, so until then here are a couple of good, but scary articles to keep you entertained (and, hopefully, at least somewhat outraged):
The Top 10 Signs of the Impending U.S. Police State: http://www.alternet.org/rights/36553
Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps: http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2064157,00.html

America’s image

“Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that [...]

AlterNet: Rights and Liberties: Keeping Tabs on the Peaceniks

This really makes me rather angry. It doesn’t SURPRISE me, not in the least, not after I heard Brian Terrell say “vegetarianism” and “involvement with organic foods” was part of the rationale for investigating him under the FBI Joint Terror task force and that pacifist anabaptist groups were on the terrorist suspect list, but it [...]

the Katrina of 2007?

That’s how Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York refers to the current scandal regarding the treatment of wounded Iraq vets at Walter Reed hospital.
While comparisons may be apt on the count of massive government negligence and indifference regarding both the poorer denizens of the Gulf Coast and the wounded soldiers returning home from Iraq, [...]

a brief musing about FOX media

It’s funny… I remember when I was younger that FOX was trumpeted, at least in the circles to which I had access, as being this great socially subversive “liberal stronghold” that presented programs that undermined traditional morality. The Simpsons is the example that most readily comes to mind, but there was also Married… With Children [...]

American Empire

Again, from http://rosecoveredglasses.blogspot.com

The Liberating Image: Imago Dei in Genesis 1 by J. Richard Middleton

J. Richard Middleton’s The Liberating Image: Imago Dei in Genesis 1 is an excellent exegetical look at Genesis 1 and particularly the “Image of God” section in vv. 26-28. The book was written, I believe, for the completion of his Ph.D at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto. It is divided into three parts, [...]

on force (very brief)

I just noticed that I talk a lot about force, to the extent where I might even give sometimes the impression that I think we’re under some kind of military dictatorship.  This is obviously not the case.  Force is far from the only weapon used to ensure compliance, and far from the most common.  Empire [...]

another thought on Romans 13, the oppressiveness of Christianity

my original post on Romans 13
This pertains, actually, to Paul’s immediately previous statement about repaying evil with good. Could it be that Paul has in mind that the Christians, as a sect with subversively dangerous ideas to the Empire, should keep their noses so clean, as it was, that the officials could legitimately find [...]

a brief on language and domination

Language tends to demonstrate the human tendency for domination in all things. Written language is probably stronger in this than spoken, but I would say language has a dominating tendency because when we speak we essentially make sounds (or write symbols that represent sounds) that have no meaning in and of themselves, but we (at [...]

Nieztsche, the fall, anarcho-primitivism, and human domination

[Anything which] is a living and not a dying body… will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant — not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power… ‘Exploitation’… belongs to the essence of what [...]