Enraged Citizens Stage ‘Tea Party’ Protest Over Tax Increases For The People Who Take Four Fifths Of Their Money Plus Interest

America’s Heroic Businesses Help Millions ‘Go Galt’ In Spite Of Government Interference, Temporary Stipends

“Expert” Testimony From “FBI” On “Torture” Refuted By Special Episode Of 24

Cheney Acknowledges Grievous Error In Denouncing Robert Downey Junior Before Finishing ‘Tropic Thunder’

I’ve got a bigger post on green culture on the way, but in the meanwhile (and because I’ve lost his name before) I’d like to direct your attention to Wang Chong, an obscure Taoist who – in addition to having a name which we must find hilarious – was not only one of the few Chinese philosophers to come from humble origins but also profoundly skeptical, coming to incorrect conclusions frequently but tearing the superstitions of his time a new asshole. From Wikipedia:

People say that spirits are the souls of dead men. That being the case, spirits should always appear naked, for surely it is not contended that clothes have souls as well as men.

I’m Glenn Beck / and I’m here to say
The IRA are smuggling drugs in my mouth / On Kolob I will be Jesus’s favorite wife
Bamboo, Obama, connect the dots people / Oh God the Arabs are watching again

Prophesy is an interesting word, partially because it doesn’t actually mean anything*; it is the verbal form of prophecy, and a fairly predominantly American Evangelical phenomenon. It rests on a wackily fundamental misunderstanding, and it’s everywhere.
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OH SEATTLE-CHAN

An unnerving number of North America’s political cartoonists are bizarrely obsessed with President Obama’s lips.

Today is the last Martin Luther King Junior day to be observed under George W. Bush; he is, in spite of himself, an icon for the religious right – in the temple of a sort of Aryan superhero a grand emissary from Mammon incongruously welcomed.

The next one will be observed under Barack Obama; such is the nature of our polity that he represents (for now) the relative left, a man of centrist convictions generally aligned with the neo-liberal movement, a sighted lunatic in a nation of blind lunatics, a Lodge or Rockefeller surrounded by Goldwaters.

I can’t expect, as long as the religious right continues to dominate the media’s picture of ‘religious issues’ and the right-wing power-structure remains in place, that we will see a national candidate, or really even a national figure, similar to King. The Christian left has these days been relegated to the sidelines, pushed into common cause with soft-rightists and eccentrics.

Martin Luther King Junior Day 2009 will be celebrated under an evangelical reactionary, and Martin Luther King Junior Day 2010 under America’s closest equivalent to a Christian Democrat. We can at least take some comfort in the country’s rejection of the alternative.

(EDIT: By some inexplicable thinko, I managed to misname the principal subject of this article – and in spite of looking at it repeatedly for some time have only just now realized. Outside of the vague resemblance between ‘k’ and ‘d’ and the fact that this article was dashed out fairly quickly, I can offer no real excuse for this; it is simply unfortunate that it fell into the beginning of a long period of personal infirmity and I didn’t notice earlier. MGC. AK)

1. Lies about George Soros by American right-wing pseudopopulists — the better to induct him into their spooky ethnic villain pantheon, a sort of Captain Planet in reverse — generally paint him the exact way Bernard Madoff is: an intensely communitarian, money-grubbing Jew. He is not quite literally a vampire, but he’s been involved in his share of theft and ethnic palm-greasing.

(POINT OF CLARITY: This is the major bit of this essay I felt somewhat uncomfortable about, if only because the subject of powerful Jews is so mixed up with cultural baggage that people are inevitably going to read this as endorsement of something it isn’t. So for the record, within the financier class Madoff is typical as an aspiring big-man but atypical as a Jew. Most of his colleagues – and I would guess even a majority of people funding Zionist charities in the US – are white Christians, largely evangelical protestants. The main thrust of the domestic Zionist project, in which Makoff involved himself as an aspirant capitalist aristocrat, is basically to set specific parameters on the social pressures on American Jews – and, most importantly, to assimilate them as much as possible into a specific subculture with a somewhat unrealistic, idealized relationship with Israel – a relationship that has become increasingly obsolete and replaced with what they regard as an unwelcome cynicism.)

“The Jews just aren’t a big issue in Louisiana. We keep telling David [Duke], stick to attacking the blacks. There’s no point in going after the Jews, you just piss them off and nobody here cares about them anyway.”

former Duke campaign manager, 1990

He is a sort of hypertrophied representative of the worst tendency among the worst, most well-discussed group (the reactionary upper-middle-class) in American Judaism – to live up to its worst stereotypes and fail to live up to the better one. They aren’t a people apart, but they are deeply invested in the idea of it.
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Climate change, on the other hand . . .

It is December 15, 2008. The Las Vegas valley is a city at the same latitude as San Francisco (naturally mild weather) in the middle of the northern Mojave Desert (little rainfall, extreme temperatures). So we do occasionally get snow – except it only sticks at night and in the dead of winter. Las Vegas should only ever get about half an inch deep in snow in late January.

In North Las Vegas, they’re reporting an inch or more. The photos are foggy, with non-evergreens – trees which normally only start to brown and die around Christmas, because we have no autumn – covered in snow.

We’ve been through fog this winter so thick visibility was limited to feet. I know most of you are probably from temperate climates, so I want you to imagine a climate where it is spring and fall for about two weeks, winter for about a month, and summer for the rest of the year. We get so hot that you can fry an egg on the sidewalk in February. We get torrential rain in the early winter that has been taking place in the first weeks of November.

Before the year is out people will have slipped and killed themselves on black ice around the Strip.

I wish there was something funny I could say about this, but the capital of the Mojave is covered in more snow than New York got at any point in 1999. I love snow and all, but I’m actually pretty fucking terrified right now.