Robert Frost Prophesies of Dr. Strangelove.

With him the love of country means
Blowing it all to smithereens
And having it all made over new.

—Robert Frost, “A Case for Jefferson”

The Cool Green Party Platform.

I am a really big Wendell Berry fan. I am delivering a paper at the Fordham Graduate English Conference in October on “Wendell Berry’s Poetic Against Industrial Agriculture.”

My political views on my Facebook, instead of the usual Conservative, Liberal, Moderate variety, are: Local Economies, Agrarianism, Micro-capitalism, Post-Colonialism, Pacifism, and Fair Trade.

I have found it hard to label myself a particular persuasion. As I read from the Anabaptist tradition I found myself drastically changing my political outlook and the reason I was political. Most people are political for their advantage…that’s why so many demographic categories swing one way or the other, because one candidate will help them reach their goals more than the other one.

I no longer see my vote as an endorsement of a candidate. It’s a contract. In a political environment that doesn’t include Jesus, choosing a candidate or platform is always the lesser of two evils scenario.

I am not endorsing the Green Party here, for I say along with Shane Claiborne: “I want to be an adviser to every politico that asks, and an endorser of no one but Jesus.” But I will say this, the Green Party Platform is cool. Here are the 10 Key Values of the Green Party: Den ganzen Beitrag lesen »

Like a Monster in a Horror Flick, It Won’t Die.

Don’t let the fancy cover design and neat graphic art fool you. This book will suck the life out of your Christianity.

The Dispensationalism Song
to the tune of “My Hope is Built”

“My hope is built on nothing less

Than Scofield’s notes and Ryrie’s text.”

I read this whole book in three long sittings in the library when I was a freshman in college.  I hadn’t yet learned that in order to save your soul you had to refuse to let books like this guilt you into something so preposterous.  That’s when I started to follow a standard ratio: for every dispensational book I was assigned in Bible classes I read an N.T. Wright book.  It helped me keep my theological sanity.

Ways Churches Can Help Suburbia.

Tim Chester on Subtext shares some thoughts on using the church to build community cohesiveness.

So here are some ideas for a kingdom approach to architecture and town planning:

– the creation of civic foci in suburbia
– the provision of infrastructure for walking
– the integration housing, retail, business and light industry
– the integration of different social grouping through mixed housing
– a focus on shared space in the home rather than segregated space

Christians would also do well to think about shared space for family
life and hospitality when they choose homes, and to prioritise this
over separate space (like en suite facilities). I would also love to
see Christians in the UK finding ways to spend time out at the front of
their homes.

This would be awesome in the US as well. Take the community stance of Wendell Berry, the sociological-theological function of the church from Milbank, the liturgical significance of locality from Gordon Lathrop, and mix it all together and you end up with something like this.

PETA, Mexicans, and the Problem of Chile Colorado.

“We think that Mexicans and other immigrants should be warned if they cross into the U.S. they are putting their health at risk by leaving behind a healthier, staple diet of corn tortillas, beans, rice, fruits and vegetables,” —Lindsay Rajt, assistant manager of PETA’s vegan campaigns.

Umm, as a Mexican American, I can safely say you are being a bit judgemental of the impoverished Mexican stereotype.  Mexicans love meat.

Last time I saw her my grandma made chile colorado and carnitas.  They have pork in them.  And that is the tip of the iceberg:

I love carnitas for lunch.

And chorizo for breakfast (and lunch, and dinner).

And carne asada cut up and placed in tortillas.

And a big tamal with pork.

And chicken mole (PETA, I don’t know if you can tell, but chicken mole has chicken in it…).

And don’t forget about flan, which has eggs and milk in it, which come from the chickens in the mole and the cattle in the carne asada.

Now don’t get me wrong here, I agree with a lot of what PETA stands for.  Have you ever seen a CAFO?  I don’t think you can be a civilized human after seeing them—stare at one, look at the thousands of chickens cooped up unable to move and wonder at the audacity of agribusiness to treat animals like bricks stacked at Home Depot.

I understand there are problems and inabilities for people, especially people in the suburbs like me, to always get CAFO-free, Organic, grass fed, Fair Trade, etc.  But my wife and I try to, we really do.  And we have drastically cut our meat intake to once a week (if that) because we feel that until we can live in a place where we can eat well raised happy chickens we cannot actively support the agricultural-industrial conglomerate continue to choke the health and welfare of our country.

But come on PETA, some Mexicans have enough money to buy meat before they move to this country.

Fake Fireworks: Why We Can No Longer Believe Our TVs (Part 1).

The news about the fake fireworks at the Olympics has been making its way around the web. I slept through most of the fakery, so I don’t have much of an opinion as to how good the photo forgery was, but I can say that this benign example of video feed manipulation has wide effects on how we perceive reality from the powers that be.

From Slashdot:

“London’s Telegraph newspaper reports that some of the fireworks which appeared over Beijing during the television broadcast of the Olympic Opening Ceremony were actually computer generated. But hold on it’s not necessarily as bad as you think. The faked fireworks were actually set-off at the stadium, but because of potential dangers in filming the display live from a helicopter, viewers at home were shown a pre-recorded, computer-generated shot.”

Computer generated shots meshed with real shots have broad implications for news networks, and even broader applications for governments, corporations, and other powerful entities. Video has long been used as Apostle Thomas test, were the apostle famously stated he would not believe in Christ unless he saw him with his own eyes. We have used a video lens in place of our own eyes, and transferred our seeing from that of our own eyes (which have been shown in eye-witness testimony to not always be very good when it comes down to only one person) to the eyes of a camera. Seeing is believing, especially when a large group sees something, and a consensus can begin to form. When a group can be manipulated by the “all seeing eye” of a camera in such media as a movie or drama, mediums that use special effects to make something appear more real or hyper-real, the consequence is entertainment. When a group is manipulated by the camera in a documentary or live film, when everything is supposed to be raw, the ability to trust the producer is significantly altered. What else are we going to see from NBC on tape delay that we do not think might have been altered?

More coming, so stay with…

BMc Endorses Obama.

Brian McLaren endorsed Barack Obama…sigh.  Jump on the bandwagon and vote Jesus for President!

Manny Ramirez: Make My Hopes Come True!.

I have always been a Dodgers fan, and each year I hope that they make the playoffs. I feel I am a nuanced and educated baseball fan, and that one must respect the game enough to realize that being in contention and trying to make the playoffs is all you can expect out of a baseball team, and that most every team in baseball will come up short of the playoffs, unlike in the NFL, NHL, or NBA when a far higher percentage of teams make the playoffs (12 of 32 teams in the NFL: 37.5% of teams; 16 of 30 teams in the NHL: 53.3%; 16 of 30 teams in the NBA: 53.3%). The percentage of teams that make the playoffs in Major League Baseball is only 26.7%. Basically, for every one team that makes the playoff three go home unhappy. And before expansion and the advent of the wild-card team, the percentage used to be 16.7% of teams (4 of 24). I conclude my statistical digression.

Now that Manny Ramirez has been traded to the Dodgers, I am hoping for a World Series birth. Or, given that the Dodgers have only won a single playoff game since 1988, just win the Division Series and play well in the League Championship Series. But still, it’s hard for me not to wonder at this point if the team has a legitimate shot at the World Series now if the players that are on the Disabled List can come back in September and play well. One can hope.

Build a Garden In Your Backyard (or have someone do it for you).

Allison Arieff at the “By Design” New York Times Blog wrote a great post, “Grow Your Own,” which chronicles how she paid a company to replace her backyard lawn with a garden that now produces two boxes of produce each week.

A quote:

Urban agriculture has been around since at least the 18th century, but it’s an idea whose time has truly come — now — in the United States. The reasons range from the fact that our hands are always found glued to computer keys and not even occasionally in the dirt, to the scary existence of industrially grown tomatoes that may (or may not) cause salmonella, to the fact that a drive to the market can now cost more than the food you purchase there.

Though some may see this as a “lazy locavore” trend — wherein couch potato clients, glass of biodynamic Syrah in hand, observe the hard labor of city farmers while lounging with their laptops — the urban agriculture movement seems to me to be slowly transcending its elitist associations. It is truly growing into something that is wholly about collaboration, community and connection to food, to neighbors, to land.

Great things are happening in sustainability!

My Recent Media Excursions.

While I was on vacation in Vermont I became addicted to “Deadliest Catch.”

The new Coldplay album, Viva La Viva Or Death And All His Friends, is fantastic, I think their best yet.

Ladron Que Roba a Ladron is an excellent, and curiously made movie—an American movie in Spanish about Latinos and immigrants.  With a good dose of Oceans 11.  Rent it!

I just listened to Stephen Colbert’s I am America and So Can You.  I had to try hard to not disrupt my cubicle budies with riotous laughter.  Audiobooks are a great way to recover work/life balance while at work.

That reminds me, I need to start listening to Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver right now.