jjjveryness.com

What a perfect way to flaunt the worth of gold during this economic downturn.

“Among my evangelical friends who voted for Bush in 2000, they thought he was going to end abortion and gay marriages. Instead, they got the war in Iraq, tax cuts for the super rich and they got Katrina,” said Shaun Casey, a professor of ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington.

From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

According to the Associated Press, 4000 Americans soldiers have now died in the war in Iraq.
The best commentary I’ve seen on that toll is at Obsidian Wings. Staggering.

(Photo of Trainwreck courtesy Diseuse at Flickr)

I don’t watch much television on actual tvs. As such, most of my viewing is the product of recommendations - almost never channel-surfing. Owing to a missing battery cable, I found myself with a little free time and during a NCAA blow-out, flipped through the channels. I landed on High School Reunion, slighlty recognizing the name from someplace now distant.

After watching on and off for 45 minutes, which was all I could bear, I can say that High School Reunion is worse than very bad. It is very, very, very bad. I am not talking about the good kind of very bad, like Hall and Oates or The Core where bad is actually entertaining. I am talking about unredemptive dretch that has no higher aspiration than to fill 22 minutes of airtime and cater to the narcissistic whims of a groups of almost 40 year old would-be stars. The show was sad, dull, artificial and I am worse a man for having lost any time to it.

Philo Farnsworth must roll in grave.

(Photo of Trainwreck courtesy tastypiesinc at Flickr)

I’ve often thought how powerful it would be to have images from Good Friday and Easter - to see Jesus on the cross, his followers in despair, and then to see, perhaps, images from Mary when she saw the angel in the empty tomb. Not only would it be a powerful and moving visual narrative, but what a persuasive evangelistic tool, right?
In a recent New York Times article about Obama’s historic speech on race…

The Rev. Joel Hunter, senior pastor of a mostly white evangelical church of about 12,000 in Central Florida, described Mr. Obama’s speech, in which the Democratic presidential candidate discussed his relationship with the former pastor of his home church in Chicago, as a kind of “Rorschach inkblot test” for the nation.

“It calls out of you what is already in you,” Dr. Hunter said, predicting that those desiring to address the topic would regard the speech as a spur, while those indifferent to issues of race might pay it little heed.

Regardless of what photos, video or first-hand accounts of Christ on the cross we may have, they will never do more than call out of us what’s already there. Perhaps that means that to you, a good man was martyred that first Good Friday, case closed. Or perhaps to you, Christians reverse engineered history and proof is simply evidence of a vast conspiracy.

My belief is the third option - Jesus, the incarnation of God, died a horrible and painful (undeserved) death through torture.

Pictures would be nice, but they’d only confirm what I already know to be true.

(Photo of Trainwreck courtesy chubbywabi at Flickr)

This is the latest photograph from Elizabeth Soule’s Little Zoo series.
Other favorites are little elephant, the swan on blue and the deer and vines. Really, the whole set is worth a few minutes perusal.
You can buy prints and cards from her Etsy shop - I’m purchasing this card right now - or some mounted work at the shiny squirrel.

It’s old news to many, but freerice.com is a great way to help the hungry and your vocabulary at the same time.
Hunger and starvation are very real problems and a mark of shame on the wealthy Western world. It’s genius to connect casual gamers with solving world hunger once multiple-choice vocab quiz at a time.
There are some definitions Freerice.com deems correct that I take umbrage at: compendium is not a ’summary’, it’s more a collection of related works; and ambivalance is not ‘unknown’, but closer to indifference. But the strange mix of words they quiz with more than makes up for the occasional shady synonym. Strangely, umbrage, which I wrote earlier, was just a quiz word. And sesquipedalian came up this go around which helped end my long and heretofore vain quest to remember that word over the last few weeks. (I knew I came across it reading something about the recently departed William F. Buckley Jr., but I could not find this article despite my great commitment of time to the search until now.)

In the L.A. Times today there’s a story about someone firing at a woman and her 8-year-old son in a grocery store parking lot. The boy is in the hospital with injuries sustained during the shooting. They know who the shooter is and where he is, but are not arresting him. Instead, he’s on administrative leave because the shooter in question was an off-duty cop.
Note to self - before committing violent crime sign up for the police force to avoid arrest.

The full text of his speech is here.
There are two passages I find especially illuminating.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

I think he meets the bar of success with this deft turn, near his conclusion. I’ll post video when it’s available.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

I’m sure Nasa spent $16b in 2007 on more than just this photo. But aside from this development from Mars, I’m not sure what we have to show for it.
While I may not have the firmest grasp on what else you could buy for $16b, I do have a few ideas. Perhaps a crazy moon base, another Halliburton no-bid contract for contaminated water for the war in Iraq or enough computers for every person in Angola.
Pretty photo, though.