Here's a wonderful retort to small-government conservatives:

"Other than telling us how to live, think, marry, pray, vote, invest, educate our children, and, now, die, I think the Republicans have done a fine job of getting government out of our personal lives." (p. 36, editorial page, Portland Oregonian, 19 June 2005)

I used this quote when criticizing George Will's ANWR errors:

"That's what happened to Jimmy Carter--he asked Americans to take responsibility for their profligate ways, and promptly lost to Ronald Reagan, who told them once again that they could do anything they wanted." (p. 125, Jane Smiley, "The Unteachable Ignorance of the Red States," Slate, 4 November 2004)

Although I'm an atheist, these two pro-Christian quotes well worth pondering (the second one I had read a long time ago, but hadn't added to my commonplace book):

"Liberalism is secular Christianity." (p. 115, anonymous)

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth can save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." (p. 128, Jesus, The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas)

I laughed out loud over this one:

"Jesse Helms and Newt Gingrich were shaking hands congratulating themselves on the introduction of an anti-gay bill in Congress. If it passes, they won't be able to shake hands, because it will then be illegal for a prick to touch an asshole." (p. 248, Judy Carter, "Editor's Bit," BC Magazine, 16 June 2005)

TR would be appalled at the depths to which his (former) party has sunk over the past century:

"There once was a time in history when the limitation of governmental power meant increasing liberty for the people. In the present day the limitation of governmental power, of governmental actions, means the enslavement of the people by the great corporations." (p. 279, Theodore Roosevelt, Progressive Principles: Selections from Addresses Made During the Presidential Campaign of 1912)

Mencken was a hell-raiser of historic proportions, and funny to boot:

"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry." (p. 340, H.L. Mencken, Minority Report, 1956)

So was the great anarchist Emma Goldman:

"The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought." (p. 380, Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, 1910)

Krugman does a great job here:

"If Bush said the earth was flat, the mainstream media would have stories with the headline: 'Shape of the Earth--Views Differ.' Then they'd quote some Democrat saying that it was round." (p. 364, Paul Krugman, interviewed by Terence McNally, "The Professor Takes the Gloves Off," AlterNet, 12 November 2003)

This was depressingly prescient concerning Jonah Goldberg's screed Liberal Fascism:

"Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal." (p. 636, Ronald Reagan, Time, 17 May 1976)

We could really use a Schlesinger today:

"Human rights is not a religious idea. It is a secular idea, the product of the last four centuries of Western history. ... The basic human rights documents--the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man--were written by political, not religious, leaders." (p. 33, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., 1989 speech at Brown University, quoted in 2000 Years of Disbelief)

"The great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights in the contemporary sense--not only for their acquiescence in poverty, inequality and oppression, but for their enthusiastic justification of slavery, persecution, torture and genocide." (p. 506, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Cycles of American History, 1999)

These words are especially apropos for this coming weekend:

"It occurs to me that my patriotic duty is to recapture my flag from the men now waving it in the name of jingoism and censorship." (p. 395, Barbara Kingsolver, "And Our Flag Was Still There," San Francisco Chronicle, 25 September 2001)

I wish no public service of any kind.

I wish no religious service of any kind.

I prefer a private gathering at my home, attended by friends and family members who shall be determined by my immediate surviving family (wife and daughter).

The exact nature of this gathering shall be determined by my immediate surviving family (wife and daughter). It should be extremely informal, they should play rhythm and blues music, and they should laugh a lot. Vague references to spirituality (secular) will be permitted.

Out of the 10 commandments, 4 (1, 2, 3, 10) are counter to American laws. 3 (6, 8, 9) are part of our legal system, but are part of just about every legal system in history. 2 (4, 5) are not a part of our laws. And 1 (7) may or may not be a part of state or local laws. Even in a state that has laws concerning #7, that still means less than half of the 10 commandments carry any legal weight, and an equal number are illegal to enforce.

Those that claim the 10 commandments are our basis for law apparently do not know the law very well. The only thing funnier is those that want it posted illegally in schools "to teach children respect for the law".

(The voice in my head is reading Berard's words in George Carlin's voice...I like that a lot.)

The surveillance system now approved by Congress provides the physical apparatus for the government to collect and store a huge database on virtually the entire population, available for data mining whenever the government wants to target its political opponents at any given moment--all in the hands of an unrestrained executive power. It is the infrastructure for a police state.

Section 802 of the bill, "Procedures for Implementing Statutory Defenses," is the odious portion that would grant retroactive immunity. Short of reading the entire 114-page bill, Patrick Keefe's "Five Myths about the New Wiretapping Law" piece at Slate is a great debunking of the pro-administration spin about the bill:

...the bill effectively pardons the telecom giants that assisted the Bush administration in the warrantless wiretapping program. They will now be shielded from dozens of civil lawsuits brought against them after their involvement was exposed. [...] For the suits against them to be "promptly dismissed," they must demonstrate to the judge not that what they did was legal but only that the White House told them to do it.

If you don't agree that the telecoms should receive retroactive immunity for their warrantless wiretaps, then tell your Senators to oppose HR 6304 in the spirit of the regularly-celebrated-but-infrequently-read Declaration of Independence. Their contact information is here, and the EFF suggests some language to use:

I'm a constituent and I urge you to oppose telecom immunity.

Vote "no" on the FISA Amendments Act, which contains blanket immunity for telecoms that cooperated in warrantless government spying. It is very important to me that Americans have their day in court against lawbreaking telecoms.

Supporters of telecom immunity will tell you the bill is a compromise but it's not. The changes have been purely cosmetic, and your constituents can see right through it. False compromises that grant the telephone companies immunity for participating in warrantless wiretapping are unacceptable.

Do it today! This vote means more to the future of freedom in America than all the festivities and fireworks which will occupy our weekend. Do we care about the substance of freedom, or only about its trappings?

Note: While researching this issue, I found the excellent OpenCongress website, which includes both the status and the text of the bill. (It's also a one-stop shop for all your Congressional information: the status of pending legislation, vote breakdowns by party, Congresscritters' voting history, campaign donations by industry, etc. I highly recommend it as a resource for keeping an eye on Congress, as it's far more user-friendly than any of the official government websites.)

That's exactly the kind of snark we need...bravo!

Alison Bechdel has a four-page graphic essay in the latest issue (the 1000th, celebrating "The New Classics") of Entertainment Weekly. It's a nice piece on the subject of compulsory reading, which she posted here on her blog. Also interesting to fans of the graphic form is EW's list of "The 100 Best Books of the Last 25 Years." EW is generally friendly to graphic novels, and this list is no exception; here are the six that made the list:

7. Maus, Art Spiegelman (1986/1991)
13. Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986-87)
37. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi (2003)
46. Sandman, Neil Gaiman (1988-1996)
54. Jimmy Corrigan, Chris Ware (2000)
68. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel (2006)

While I've only read a smattering of the text-only books on EW's list, I'm 5-for-6 with the graphic novels (I would be batting 1.000, but I've only read parts of Sandman). EW might have considered a few others as well:

Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo)
Barefoot Gen (Keiji Nakazawa)
Black Hole (Charles Burns)
Blankets (Craig Thompson)
Bone (Jeff Smith)
Cerebus (Dave Sim/Gerhard)
Dark Knight (Frank Miller)
From Hell (Alan Moore/Eddie Campbell)
Love and Rockets (Los Bros. Hernandez)
Palestine (Joe Sacco)
Sin City (Frank Miller)
Understanding Comics (Scott McCloud)
V for Vendetta (Alan Moore/David Lloyd)
300 (Frank Miller)

The Q&A page answers the obvious question first:

What about "term limits?"

The important thing to understand about so-called "term limits" is that they are man's law, not God's Law. The God who parted the Red Sea is surely not worried about so-called "term limits". When you vote your faith you let Almighty God take care of the details.

Presidential term limits are not in the Bible. And they were not in our Constitution until added by an activist congress in 1951.

I wish them the best of luck in their endeavor! </snicker>

Ooh, those are some really hurtful insults...if they hadn't waited until Carlin died to call him names, he would have given them a verbal smackdown from which they'd never recover! I wish they would just crawl back under whatever pew they came from, and stop spreading their ignorance and hatred.

How sad that Carlin's friends and family will now have their ceremony tainted by WBC's presence.

Price, Robert. The Reason-Drive Life: What Am I Here on Earth For? (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2006)

As a freethinker, the publications of Prometheus Books are well-represented on my bookshelves; Robert Price's The Reason-Drive Life may just be the best I've read so far. Written as "a direct rebuttal and alternative to" (p. 21) Rick Warren's best-selling The Purpose-Driven Life, Price's book is far more than a simple criticism of Warren in particular--or even of fundamentalism in general.

The Reason-Driven Life is full of interesting tidbits and mini-lessons in theology, the most interesting of which is Chapter 26, "Satan's Sunday School." In it, Price--a professor of both Biblical Criticism and Theology & Scriptural Studies--shows Christianity's debt to Zoroastrianism in the development of Satan's backstory. Much of what Christians "know" about the history and character of Satan (as with the Catholic-invented Purgatory) is either of extra-Biblical origin or the product of rather questionable Biblical interpretation.

Price weaves the stories of various Apocrypha (The Testament of Reuben, The Apocalypse of Moses) into his book, along with plenty of quotes from Eric Hoffer's The True Believer, Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, and Hugh Prather's Notes to Myself. The scholarship serves Price's goal quite well, and leads him to solid critiques of Warren's pseudo-knowledge. Here are but two examples:

...let me remind you that Rick Warren is happy to quote from no less than fifteen different translations or paraphrases of the Bible. You know what that means, don't you? They are so different that he has a lot of shopping to do before finding one that will make the Bible appear to say what he wants it to teach. (p. 28)

There is only so far one can go plumbing the depths of the Bible when one reads it in the completely ahistorical, out-of-context manner Reverend Warren does in The Purpose-Driven Life. It is apparent he is utterly innocent of even the most basic facts of criticism. [...] What an irony that the fundamentalist champions of the Bible seem to care nothing for the text, but only for those doctrines and devotional "promises" they pry out of it. And when the Bible does not actually yield the requisite slogans and the desired devotional idiom, they will rewrite the text so that it does. (p. 348)

In a similar vein, Price's comment that "Rick Warren makes Robert Schuller look like Nietzsche" (p. 106) brought a smile to my face. Lest any reader accuse Price of nefarious atheistic intent, he goes out of his way to clarify his attitude toward the Bible:

I love the Bible. I have devoted my life to the study of it. I wrote one PhD dissertation on the various evangelical theories of biblical authority, and a second one focusing on themes in Luke and Acts. None of this means my views must be correct. But it does show I do not approach this sensitive topic as an opponent of the Bible. Just the reverse. (p. 226)

Also worth pondering are Price's rebuke to Brother Lawrence about "practicing the absence of God" (p. 122) and this passage on the "spirituality of beauty," which is my Quote of the Day:

Did you know there is a spirituality of beauty? It is what many cultured, secular people cultivate instead of overtly religious worship. It fills the same need. [...] There are certain poems that are a revelatory experience for me. The spine tingles and the soul marvels that words can be so associated. Great music awakens something within and stirs it up. Art causes you to transcend yourself, and that, in religious terms, is a reaching up of the soul to God. (p. 140)

All in all, Price's The Reason-Driven Life is a great read; I recommend it both to those who have read Warren's book and to those--such as myself--who have not.

Kudos to developer Jonathan Feinberg for generating such a delightful typographic time-sink!

I was fortunate enough to see Carlin live in concert several years ago, not long after his "Complaints and Grievances" CD was released in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. (I would have written this post sooner, but I had to listen to his routine again and transcribe a few bits.) Carlin had this to say about dissent over the invasion of Afghanistan (before Bush gave up hunting bin Laden and went after Saddam Hussein instead):

Here's the way it works: The primate brain says, "Give peace a chance." The mammalian brain says, "Give peace a chance, but first let's kill this motherfucker." And the reptilian brain says, "Let's just kill the motherfucker, go the peace rally, and get laid."

Carlin excoriated parents who plaster their cars with those "My child is an honor student" bumper stickers:

Here's a bumper sticker I'd like to see: "We are the proud parents of a child whose self-esteem is sufficient that he doesn't need us promoting his minor scholastic achievements on the back of our car."

Or: "We are the proud parents of a child who has resisted his teacher's attempts to break his spirit and bend him to the will of his corporate masters."

Here's something realistic: "We have a daughter in public school who hasn't been knocked up yet."

"We have a son in public school who hasn't shot any of his classmates yet...but he does sell drugs to your honor student. Plus, he knocked up your daughter."

(I don't hear the names "Todd" and "Tucker" in quite the same way any more, either.)

Thanks for all the laughs, George...even Thomas the Tank Engine sucked a little bit less when you did the narration.

FlowingData explores how statisticians, designers, computer scientists, and others are using data to help us understand more about ourselves and our surroundings.

There's plenty of good design there: the kind that clarifies and enhances information, rather than distracts from it. (I added FD to my RSS reader immediately upon seeing it for the first time.)

The contrast between Obama and McCain is wonderful, and I would *so* buy that as a t-shirt!

I refuse to be lectured on national security by people who are responsible for the most disastrous set of foreign policy decisions in the recent history of the United States. The other side likes to use 9/11 as a political bludgeon. Well, let's talk about 9/11.

The people who were responsible for murdering 3,000 Americans on 9/11 have not been brought to justice. They are Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and their sponsors - the Taliban. They were in Afghanistan. And yet George Bush and John McCain decided in 2002 that we should take our eye off of Afghanistan so that we could invade and occupy a country that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. The case for war in Iraq was so thin that George Bush and John McCain had to hype the threat of Saddam Hussein, and make false promises that we'd be greeted as liberators. They misled the American people, and took us into a misguided war.

Here are the results of their policy. Osama bin Laden and his top leadership - the people who murdered 3000 Americans - have a safe-haven in northwest Pakistan, where they operate with such freedom of action that they can still put out hate-filled audiotapes to the outside world. That's the result of the Bush-McCain approach to the war on terrorism.

Bravo!

While you're there, check out Amorphia Apparel and Science! as well; there are many more clever designs, such as this one: