Blown away by this…

Jeffrey Lewis is the performer…

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(link)
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Here’s another one he did that I loved…
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(link)

Meowy Christmas Everybody!

and nowwww, the Jingle Cats….

amazon link, if you’re interested. Preview the hits! We Three Kings is haunting.

fun fact: Sony once released a role playing game for Apple computers titled Jingle Cats: Aito Yujono Neko Monogatari, Love Para Daisakusen. The objective of the game was to care for and breed cats, once mating had successfully occurred, the cats sang, becoming Jingle Cats.

Christmas-topher Hitchens

Hitchens is his usual entertaining self during this interview about the holiday season, featured on The Onion AV Club’s website:

http://www.avclub.com/content/interview/christmas_with_christopher

Lots of great moments in this conversation, but here’s my favorite:

I don’t have someone permanently telling me, you know, that it’s the season to be jolly. And I don’t have to hear music that really isn’t music at all, like “Jingle Bell Rock,” blasted as if one lived in a state that allowed no alternative. Yes, actually, there are constant reminders of the Dear Leader and the Great Leader, all the fucking time. Plus, another thing I don’t like: celebrations of virginity. If asked my opinion about virginity, I would say, “I’m opposed to it.” I don’t think it deserves to be celebrated, at any rate. Or at least, if I’m not opposed, I’m very highly skeptical and critical of it.

The “Bah, Hanukkah” article to which the interviewer refers can be found here:

http://www.slate.com/id/2179045/

Have a holly jolly holiday!

“…hey, maybe we should have read more of his writings before inviting him on air…”

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Norman Solomon has written some excellent books/pieces if you’d like to read them…
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Google’s list of his books…
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His site…

Neil Cavuto can blow me… RP ‘08…

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Just so you can recognize it in the future, this is what you would call a “hit piece” by FNC… Nice try by the way Neil… “…and to be fair”… Suck it Neil…
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There are some things I disagree with on Dr. Paul, but his overall message “Just leave people alone to live their lives” resonates with me quite a bit…
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For all of you who heard of the Tea Party, here’s a few graphs showing what that day looked like… $6.04 Million is quite staggering when you consider the average donation was ~$102…

Religion in Government

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been listening to a lecture series on European History in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Each lecture focuses on the life of some monumental figure during this time period, from monarchs (Catherine the Great) and military leaders (Napoleon), to composers (Wagner) and writers (Samuel Johnson).

Anyway, I was listening to the lecture on Queen Victoria this morning, and the professor prefaced her biography with an explanation of the religious element in Victorian politics. In 19th century England, Jews could not hold positions in Parliament or receive government appointments. This rankled the chops of a Parliamentary Whig named Thomas Babington Macaulay who implored his colleagues to eradicate this prohibition in a famous speech. The professor quoted a portion of his speech, and it made me think a lot about Mitt Romney, the current president, and the collective amnesia of Americans when it comes to the separation of church and state. I’ve had conversations with a few dedicated Christians who don’t understand why a secular government is important. I think Sir Babington sums it up nicely below:

We hear of essentially Protestant governments and essentially Christian governments, words which mean just as much as essentially Protestant cookery, or essentially Christian horsemanship. Government exists for the purpose of keeping the peace, for the purpose of compelling us to settle our disputes by arbitration instead of settling them by blows, for the purpose of compelling us to supply our wants by industry instead of supplying them by rapine. This is the only operation for which the machinery of government is peculiarly adapted, the only operation which wise governments ever propose to themselves as their chief object. If there is any class of people who are not interested, or who do not think themselves interested, in the security of property and the maintenance of order, that class ought to have no share of the powers which exist for the purpose of securing property and maintaining order. But why a man should be less fit to exercise those powers because he wears a beard, because he does not eat ham, because he goes to the synagogue on Saturdays instead of going to the church on Sundays, we cannot conceive. The points of difference between Christianity and Judaism have very much to do with a man’s fitness to be a bishop or a Rabbi. But they have no more to do with his fitness to be a magistrate, a legislator, or a minister of finance, than with his fitness to be a cobbler. Nobody has ever thought of compelling cobblers to make any declaration on the true faith of a Christian. Any man would rather have his shoes mended by a heretical cobbler than by a person who had subscribed all the thirty-nine articles, but had never handled an awl. Men act thus, not because they are indifferent to religion, but because they do not see what religion has to do with the mending of their shoes. Yet religion has as much to do with the mending of shoes as with the budget and the army estimates. We have surely had several signal proofs within the last twenty years that a very good Christian may be a very bad Chancellor of the Exchequer.

I don’t know if you can consider George W. Bush a “good Christian”, but the irony of that ending sentence certainly doesn’t escape me.

The full speech can be found here.

‘Tis the Season to be…an Atheist?!

Breaking news at this hour! A con-tra-va-see!

Did you know that atheists are trying to infiltrate the holiday season by indoctrinating our Christian youth?

How, you ask? Through the guise of a fantasy holiday movie entitled The Golden Compass. The film has been adapted from a book, which was part of a children’s series entitled His Dark Materials. The author of the series, Philip Pullman, is an atheist who wrote the books in order to construct a sort of counter narrative to C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. It has some unflattering metaphorical representations of the Church and shares the vision and values of nonbelief to
children.

When the studio adapted The Golden Compass to film, it removed or whitewashed all of those critical elements, rendering the original storyline completely unrecognizable. So why are the demagogues and Christian watch groups frothing at the bit over the film’s release if its anti-religious elements have been abandoned?

Bill Donohue said that while the film itself isn’t objectionable, it could encourage the children who go to see it to read the series, which would denigrate Christianity and promote atheism for kids. As a result, he and his band of monkeys in the Catholic League have organized mass boycotts of the film. It’s a very reasonable position: Other people do not have the right to posit an opinion, narrative, fantasy tale, or any other sort of expression that directly dissents with the opinions that Bill Donohue holds. I’m not sure if you were aware of this, reader, but Bill Donohue is actually God in disguise.

Pullman’s response:

“It causes me to shake my head in sorrow that such nitwits could be loose in the world.”

Some more thoughts on Mitt’s religious bullshit…

Not to be coarse, and I do not want to alienate anyone, but Billo tries to make this woman look like her viewpoint isn’t valid or historically accurate, and it is both valid and historically accurate…
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