Hondo Hillary - 1

"Why has there never been a coup in Washington, DC?"

"There's no US Embassy there."

               -Latin American joke

Picketty's Provocation

Post-marxish writer Mike Davis, author of the superlative Ecology of Fear, once remarked at a conference, "Socialists have predicted eleven of the last three recessions."  Self-help philosophical idealism gives rise to similar proclamations of the power of positive thinking.  Recessions, the unstated reasoning goes, are good for "revolutionaries," because when the contradictions of capital are doing their worst, public education by an enlightened vanguard will cause the masses to flock to the banners of the left, and at some point, these flockings will build into the perfect storm that will overthrow the present and unjust order.

Chasin' News

Most Christians agree that we need to understand things more than superficially. In our own idiom, we call this discernment. Even those of us who are of an anti-constantinian bent tend to agree that rejection of violence and political power carried out "at the end of a gun" doesn't mean we oughtn't have an idea about what is going on in the world. This is even more urgent now, because the scale of dominant institutions that run the world has become truly transnational, and because macro-trends have profound consequences at the local level where many of us like to concentrate our practices. Moreover, Christians -- at least in my view -- need to overcome the stumbling blocks of public perception that we are all anti-intellectual and authoritarian (read: carrying around ossified rule-books for everyone).

Pacifism & Pragmatism

If ... big word in a small package. If a frog had wings, as we said back home, it wouldn't bump its ass every time it hopped.

Complimentarity (& sex, sex, and more sex)

The term "complementarity" is exactly the same age as Edythe Kirchmaier, Facebook's oldest user and California's oldest licensed driver: 106 years old. It was originally a neologism used in physics in 1908. So my own confession, the Roman Catholic Church, among others, borrowed this term from twentieth century physics. No such thing is ever mentioned in the Bible, or even by most of the church philosophers.

The cult of success

I am about to blaspheme against the entire culture. I dare you - parents, grandparents, older siblings, friends, teachers, and anyone else who people might look up to - to tell the young, "Don't seek success." Do not succeed. Do not be a winner. Do not get ahead. Do not try to "make it."