To War

Oh, don't worry, this is Clinton's war not Bush's.  Drones are Bush war, with the presumption that all men between the ages of 12 and 50 (military age males) are combatants, and bombs away!  Republicans are gonna kill some fucking hajjis, that's how they roll.  Dems go for "humanitarian military intervention," a term that ought to make Christians cringe a lot more than me speaking in the masculine voice (above).  "Bush is a gunfighter.  Clinton is a good-hearted cop.  Obama is both."  He may be writing that on a bathroom wall somewhere right now.

The Diane Rehm Show exchange (Syria)

Today, while I cleaned our house, I turned on the radio to tune into our local NPR station, which was airing the national, then the international hours of the popular Diane Rehm Show.  It was hosted by Tom Gjelten, with second-half guests Warren Strobel, diplomatic editor at Reuters, and Barbara Slavin, Washington correspondent at Al-Monitor, senior fellow at The Atlantic Council.

Barbara Slavin

Atlantic Council (committed to Western dominance)

Egypt - Thoughts

It seems there is a nascent civil war in Egypt.  In early 2011, Western "progressives" hailed the mass demonstrations in Egypt, and the "Arab Spring" of which they were in many ways a part, as a political marvel worthy of our own emulation, and it was conjoined in the minds of many with the now quiescent American "Occupy Wall Street" movement.

Today, Syria is embroiled in a bloodthirsty civil war, anti-army forces in Egypt have killed 20 soldiers in an ambush, hundreds lay dead and maimed by the recent military crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hosni Mubarak, the Americans' quisling ex-leader, is apparently about to be released from prison.

Safety, Sentimentalization, and the Invention of Childhood

I heard a story from a friend at church.  He posted the story on facebook.  Not a story actually, but a brief account of an actual incident that happened to him (today, as I write this).  He was in the local box store (Meijers, here in greater metropolitan Adrian, Michigan), grabbing some groceries with his two boys - bright energetic fellas who are around the same age I was when I hunted with my dad, swam with local pals at a nearby quarry, and tried smoking corn silk.

Just-Civil-Total... War & Civic Religion

This is an examination of "just war" doctrine for Roman Catholics, though many confessions claim to subscribe to some "just" war notion.  First, a little history.

In exploring the Civil War through moral lenses, one sees just how unprepared Americans were for such a cataclysm in the moral sense no less than the military or political.  And unlike politics and military arsenals, which geared up to meet the challenge, the ability to fix a moral stance never progressed.  Rather, it regressed.  On all sides – clerical, political, journalistic, military, artistic, and intellectual – the historian searches in vain for moral criticism directed at one’s own cause.  Talk of war certainly bristled from the pages of the secular press and civic assemblies, the statesmen, clergy, and intellectuals raged against the unjust conduct of the enemy.

-Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation – A Moral History of the Civil War (Penguin, 2006)

Marriage & Nature

It makes no more sense to consult the Bible on the question of how to define civil marriage than it does to consult the Bible on the rules of 21st Century maritime trade in the Mediterranean Basin.  The kinds of relations and ideas that constituted that culture is dramatically different from every culture of today.

A stroll through power - Part 3

I went to the library yesterday and picked up a copy of Howard Kurtz's Spin Cycle - Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine (The Free Press, 1998).  Then I read several reviews of the book as I paged through it.  A few quotes from the opening pages: