Can Conservative Christians make Common Cause with the Dread Cthulhu?

"Most evangelicals do perceive worship of the Elder Gods to be a cult and are deeply troubled by its theology. But this does not mean they would not vote for someone like Mighty Cthulhu. They admire his record and they agree with his conservatism on moral, social, and cultural issues. Given a choice between Hillary Clinton versus Cthulhu for President, evangelicals know how to bracket aside their theological differences with the Great Old One and would support him because of his positions on the social issues. "

More here.

Who's Next on the Invasion Hit List?

Who hates us for our freedoms more?

France?
Italy?
Brazil?
Canada?

How about the continent of North Korea?

Wacky Retro Hit from the Red Scare

YOU'RE MORE THAN A NUMBER IN MY LITTLE RED BOOK
YOU'RE MORE THAN A ONE NIGHT DATE
ALL I HAD TO TAKE ME WAS JUST ONE LOOK
MY HEART BEGAN A THUMPING BABE YOU HAD IT JUMPING

YOU'RE MORE THAN A NUMBER IN MY LITTLE RED BOOK
YOU'RE MORE THAN A ONE NIGHT STAND
IN CASE YOU GET TO THINKING THAT YOU'VE BEEN TOOK
YOU'RE MORE THAN A NUMBER WRITTEN IN MY LITTLE RED BOOK

- The Drifters

What Would Ahnold Do?

The Case of Cory Maye

A member of a SWAT team bursts into the wrong apartment during drug bust;
Man is home with his daughter;
He shoots the intruder in self defense;
He is tried for murder

...and sentenced to death.


"Might want to keep a shot of something stiff nearby as you read this one."
From The Agitator

(As is so often the case, The Clash afford a refreshing perspective.)

Terminator vs. The Civilized World

Europeans Outraged at Schwarzenegger

At the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI's top official for justice matters denounced the death penalty for going against redemption and human dignity. ..

Leaders of Austria's pacifist Green Party went as far as to call for Schwarzenegger to be stripped of his Austrian citizenship...

In Schwarzenegger's hometown of Graz, local Greens said they would file a petition to remove his name from the southern city's sports stadium. A Christian political group went even further, suggesting it be renamed the ``Stanley Tookie Williams Stadium.'' ...

``I am proud to be a Frenchman,'' [Socialist] party spokesman Julien Dray told RTL radio. ``I am proud to live in France, in a country where we don't execute somebody 21 years later.''

In Italy, the country's chapter of Amnesty International called the execution ``a cold-blooded murder.'' ...

Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni said the city would keep Williams in its memory the next time it celebrates a victory against the death penalty somewhere in the world. Rome's Colosseum, once the arena for deadly gladiator combat and executions, has become a symbol of Italy's anti-death penalty stance. Since 1999, the monument has been bathed in golden light every time a death sentence is commuted somewhere in the world or a country abolishes capital punishment.

``I hope there will be such an occasion soon,'' Veltroni said in a statement. ``When it happens, we will do it with a special thought for Tookie.''

California is scheduled to execute three more people in the next two months.

Bankruptcy Law

It's occurred to me that a segment of our elite do not want to live in an affluent society any more. They find it difficult to deal with an educated middle class, (much less working class), that has its own self-interest. They look with envy at those societies where everyone scrambles for crusts from the tables of the powerful, and thus leave the powerful to their own devices.

I remember reading a letter to the editor once in a community paper, Menlo Park, or Los Gatos or some such place, wherein the writer decried public education. Public schools cater to those who do not have a chance in our society. They are taught that they do. They therefore develop untenable and difficult expectations. So much easier if we just did away with the whole thing and educate our own children privately.

I wish I had cut out the letter. Its always fascinating to listen in on the Rich when they think no one else is listening...

Its old news...but I wonder what conversations led to this?

"On October 17th, the world became a little less financially secure for all Americans.

The passage of [the new bankruptcy law] illustrates some of the worst aspects of our system of government. A law clearly harmful to the interests of the vast majority of the American people was passed due to the massive big money lobbying by the credit card and banking industry. ...

Many of the consumer and social protections we enjoy came out of the disaster of the Great Depression. Bank deposit insurance, favorable mortgage rules, bankruptcy laws and Social Security, all came to be as ways to transfer much risk from the individual to the government or large corporations that can better shoulder these economic gyrations. The change in the bankruptcy law is the first step in undoing this..."

Shrinkage

Why is it that ancient Greek and Roman paintings, sculptures, and other works of art depict males with such small genitalia?

Straight Dope has the answer.

This is what Contempt for the Poor looks like

Testimony from New Orleans, post-Katrina

"On Tuesday, a special House Select Committee held a hearing focusing on the role of race and class in the government's response to Katrina. The hearing was requested by Georgia Representative Cynthia McKinney. She was one of the few Democrats to participate. It was a most unusual hearing - one that we rarely see on Capitol Hill. Survivors and activists testified that racism was a big reason so many were abandoned and allowed to die..."

"Alva, a 51-year-old grandmother from New Orleans East, remembers, “When we were taken to the higher ground in Jefferson Parish, what did we have to greet us? A line of military police with M-16 rifles. They watched us, caged us, laughed at us, took pictures of us with their camera-phones. I saw a young man get down on his knees and beg for water for his little baby, and I saw the child die right there on the concrete. "

Incompetent Design

"My bones proclaim a story of incompetent design.
My back still hurts, my sinus clogs, my teeth just won’t align.
If I had drawn the blueprint, I would cer-tain-ly resign.
Incompetent Design!

Evo-Evo-Evo-lution!
Design is but a mere illusion.
Darwin sparked our revolution.
Science SHALL prevail!"

The Other ID...

The Nastiness of Ayn Rand

Author of Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Rand is one if the weirder apparitions to arise on the American Right. Imagine Anton laVey birthing Donald Trump's child, and something very much like Ayn Rand would arise like Rosemary's Baby.

London Review of Books has the nitty-gritty:

...Rand’s nastiness has an earnestness to it, a desire to transform naughty frisson into iron principle. And as for sex, so for politics. Popular stories of the 1940s and 1950s are full of people being rapacious and unkind, but for Rand, noir has to become a system of world history. Her ethics are doggedly, insistently supremacist, the line between sheep and goats cut in black marker pen. You’re either a producer or a looter, on the side of ‘greatness’, ‘the individual will’ and so on, or one of the ‘parasites’, the ‘mediocrity’, the ‘second-handers’ who feed off their energy; all the heroes are gaunt, angular, square-jawed, all the looters the opposite. Good guys recognise other good guys immediately: the novels are full of heart-warming chats between a hero and a noble tramp or plumber. Bad guys stammer, and bluster, and let their weak chins wobble as their dull eyes look down at the floor.

‘From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding – To the gas chambers, go!’ Whittaker Chambers wrote in a notorious 1957 review. It was a crude thing to say, but you can see why he said it. The careening bipolar lurches in both novels grow more extreme as they go on – words such as ‘lice’ and ‘maggots’ are used, and there are moments of horrible abjection. Long after their endings have faded, the novels leave the reader trying to shake off their after- images, sometimes comic, sometimes not: the Objectivist tea party, with all the heroes grabbing at the sandwiches; the world’s poor and weak and hungry, in rags on marble steps"

As Astonishing as Elvis


...And here is the Whittaker Chambers review of Atlas Shrugged, as published by the National Review. He plucks Rand...skewers her, and then proceeds to roast her to a delightful shade of Red. (He actually suggests that she is a kind of a crypto-Marxist... necessity of unrestrained Capitalism sweeping away all vestiges of the Old Order.)

How often does an erst-while Progressive blog link to Whittaker Chambers, much less the National Review? Just one more distinction that makes this blog so fascinatingly different. I look forward to the day it actually elicits a comment.

On "Democratic" Elections

in Iraq... and here...


"in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent .... On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having even been asked a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments....

Doubtless the most miserable of men, under the most oppressive government in the world, if allowed the ballot, would use it, if they could see any chance of thereby ameliorating their condition. But it would not, therefore, be a legitimate inference that the government itself, that crushes them, was one which they had voluntarily set up, or even consented to."

~ Lysander Spooner, "No Treason"