Yet now, he says, it is clear the American experiment has been “a failure.” It was all for nothing. Soon the country will be ranked “somewhere between Brazil and Argentina, where it belongs.” The Empire will collapse militarily in Afghanistan; the nation will collapse internally when Obama is broken “by the madhouse” and the Chinese call in the country’s debts. A ruined United States will then be “the Yellow Man’s Burden,” and “they’ll have us running the coolie cars, or whatever it is they have in the way of transport.” —“Gore Vidal’s United States of Fury,” Johann Hari, The Independent
Wendy’s to emphasize the “realness” of its “food”;
how to read articles about health;
Wyoming contemplates buying the sky, selling the sky, lifting your arms up to the sky;
evil, evil new Oklahoma abortion law;
list of fifth Beatles;
P-NP makes the NY Times;
Are some things unfixable? “Oh yes, many things,” Mr. Murphy said. “Some hearts. Intellects.”
The original plan for [Sarah Palin’s] Going Rogue was to have it co-released by Harper Collins and Zondervan, the company’s Christian imprint. There were early reports that the Zondervan version would contain some extra content just for the Christian audience, but that no longer appears to be the case. It’s too bad, because that plan would have been marketing genius– the publishing equivalent of the “unrated” DVD release, with all the juicy, extra-Christian stuff that regular folks just can’t handle. It would make religious booksellers even more eager to feature the “right” version of the book and would tempt buyers with the prospect of content too hot (or holy) for mainstream viewing. Politically, the alternate version would have heightened– if it’s possible– the feeling among Palin’s socially conservative supporters that they are an isolated, besieged minority, heroic in their brave defense of traditional values. They would know that though Palin has to talk to the country as a whole, her real message is for them. And right now, they need some love. —“The Second Coming of Sarah Palin: Will Alaska’s former governor become the leader of the GOP’s religious wing?” by Paul Waldman, The American Prospect
The Bible is full of “fairy stories”? For Bloch, that’s exactly the source of its power. For him, fairytales are a repository of proletarian wisdom, explicitly opposed to the wisdom of the powerful– “to speak in a modern way, most fairytales have something Chaplinesque in them”. The fairytale is a story that comes from “the people”, against “the feudalism of the saga and the despotism of the myth”–and so too with the Bible. Bloch was adept at finding latent utopianism in the most unexpected places. The Bible’s structure of beginning, middle and end, derided as a consolatory bedtime story, becomes an example of its profound humanism, a claim that history is mutable and changeable–history is “no longer the simple ebb and flow of eternally repeated incidents, as even the Greek historians thought of it,” but something in which man can intervene. And rather than being a spiteful fantasy of burning unbelievers and the ascending faithful, it is the notion of apocalypse that is the Bible’s most important gift to history, giving us a conception of futurity, urgency and the possibility of a world transfigured – “a profound wakefulness to the future” rather than an opiated sleep is its subversive heart. —“Atheism in Christianity by Ernst Bloch,” Owen Hatherley, New Humanist
