harikari.com

via the Lapham’s Quarterly Roundtable blog post, “Turn the Other Cheek.”

The gentlemen boxers of the Young Men’s Christian Association would have been pleased to make the acquaintance of this new incarnation of faith-based fight clubs: a church cum mixed martial arts facility in Nashville called Xtreme Ministries, profiled in this week’s New York Times, which practices a combination of bare-knuckle fighting, wrestling, and kick-boxing and whose motto is “Where Feet, Fist and Faith Collide.”

Leonard Lane, left, fighting for Xtreme Ministries, a church that doubles as a martial arts academy. photo by Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

The Roundtable post connects this new rougher and tougher image of Jesus and his disciples to the Muscular Christianity movement that arrived in the U.S. around the turn of the 20th Century.  They thought that Christian leaders had pretty much morphed the image of Jesus into a woman during the previous century, and they wanted to turn him into a man again. 

One of the movement’s followers was Dr. R. warren Conant who wrote a book titled The Virility of Christ in which he describes his image of Jesus:

When Christ met a man, that man however dull knew instinctively that he stood in the presence of no ordinary person. There were the commanding pose and carriage, the piercing eye, the thoughtful brow; every movement, look and gesture speaking of reserve power, physical, mental, and moral. To an ordinary man the first impression would be overawing, to an extraordinary man a challenge, were it not for the kindly smile which immediately softened the expression; the strong, resonant voice vibrating with sympathy and good-fellowship; the words so fitly chosen for each one’s case.

That Christ’s voice was resonant and of great carrying power was a necessary consequence of his practice of preaching in the open air to audiences of five thousand and upward. And that proves another fact in regard to Christ’s physical appearance —big lung capacity and therefore a well developed torso.

There’s a website dedicated to this new incarnation of Muscular Christians called Anointed Fighter, and according to their “About Us” page:

Anointed Fighter (AF) recognizes that Mixed Martial Arts has become a cultural phenomenon as the fastest growing spectator sport in the world. AF desires to reach the MMA world and its culture with the message of salvation by providing hope, encouragement and truth in a relevant way while breaking down misconceptions of what it means to be a disciple of Christ.

AF envisions a time when every MMA enthusiast around the world will be impacted by its ministry through licensed merchandise, print publications, multimedia productions and short-term outreach events that will lead to long-term, self-sustaining discipleship programs.

And in the Anointed Fighter Handbook, you will find:

We are God’s anointed and together we will enjoy eternal life. Until then, we must step inside the cage of life and battle the enemy. Our enemy is a cunning creature. He knows how to punch and kick us off the path of righteousness. He attempts to choke out the light of the Lord in our lives.  We can tap out or we can fight him.

Jesus never tapped out man, and you can wear that message proudly if you buy this t-shirt:

So you see, contrary to that soft-focus image of a meek philosopher Jesus you probably have in your head…

…Jesus was not a wimp.  Jesus was a big, strong, loud, barrel-chested man…

 …and, if need be, he could kick your ass.

Repent or else!

A few weeks ago, Rose — who is 91 — went with her daughter Elizabeth, 52, to enjoy a Christmas Eve cocktail at Von’s Grand City Cafe, a martini bar on Pine Street in downtown Seattle’s shopping district.

Rose didn’t bring along her purse. She’s been forgetful of late, leaving things behind. Her daughter was buying anyway, so why bother?

Big mistake. The waitress carded Rose. When Rose couldn’t produce proof of her age, she was told she couldn’t order a drink and would have to leave the bar.

“I was kind of in shock,” Rose says. “I didn’t know I looked so young!”

…

“In the good old days,” Rose says, “I don’t remember things being so fussy.”

This story reminds me of an incident at a Belltown bar a few weeks ago when a bouncer would not let a fifty-year-old friend of ours into the bar because he did not have his ID. Granted, it’s kind of dumb to go out without your ID, but it’s also pretty ridiculous to deny someone entry into a bar that is obviously at least twice the legal drinking age.

The bouncer did let our friend in the bar after about twenty minutes. We asked him why, and he told us that he determined our friend wasn’t a cop. He said the undercover cops that try and get in without ID so they can bust bouncers don’t stand around waiting for their friends, they move on to the next bar.

This is what we Seattleites get thanks to a recent police crackdown on underage drinking. I don’t have any problem with police issuing citations to bars that aren’t careful about checking ID’s and end up serving minors. It’s the law, and drinking establishments should comply with it.

I do have a problem with the police bothering bars for serving people that are, without a doubt, well over the legal drinking age. For one, I’m not even sure that drinking without an ID is against the law; and two, sending undercover cops out to see if bars will serve people who are obviously over age 21 that don’t happen to be carrying ID smells like entrapment to me.

The bars don’t want any citations that will put them at risk of losing their licenses, so they end up doing stupid things like not serving a ninety-one-year-old lady a martini and then, as if that’s not bad enough, they make her leave the premises.

I thought it was bad enough around here that we can’t walk around Bumbershoot festival grounds with a beer in our hands, and that we can’t open a beer or a bottle of wine on a public beach. But now, old people get denied a drink and kicked out of bars.

Hey Seattle! Pull that stick out of your ass and loosen up a little.

From Thom Hartmann’s column:

When Columbus first landed on Hispaniola in 1492, virtually the entire island was covered by lush forest. The Taino “Indians” who loved there had an apparently idyllic life prior to Columbus, from the reports left to us by literate members of Columbus’s crew such as Miguel Cuneo.

When Columbus and his crew arrived on their second visit to Hispaniola, however, they took captive about two thousand local villagers who had come out to greet them. Cuneo wrote: “When our caravels… where to leave for Spain, we gathered…one thousand six hundred male and female persons of those Indians, and these we embarked in our caravels on February 17, 1495…For those who remained, we let it be known (to the Spaniards who manned the island’s fort) in the vicinity that anyone who wanted to take some of them could do so, to the amount desired, which was done.”

Cuneo further notes that he himself took a beautiful teenage Carib girl as his personal slave, a gift from Columbus himself, but that when he attempted to have sex with her, she “resisted with all her strength.” So, in his own words, he “thrashed her mercilessly and raped her.”

While Columbus once referred to the Taino Indians as cannibals, a story made up by Columbus – which is to this day still taught in some US schools – to help justify his slaughter and enslavement of these people. He wrote to the Spanish monarchs in 1493: “It is possible, with the name of the Holy Trinity, to sell all the slaves which it is possible to sell…Here there are so many of these slaves, and also brazilwood, that although they are living things they are as good as gold…”

Columbus and his men also used the Taino as sex slaves: it was a common reward for Columbus’ men for him to present them with local women to rape. As he began exporting Taino as slaves to other parts of the world, the sex-slave trade became an important part of the business, as Columbus wrote to a friend in 1500: “A hundred castellanoes (a Spanish coin) are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten (years old) are now in demand.”

There’s more.  Hartmann also writes briefly about the “Pequot War of 1636.” 

I remember reading about this war in a college American Literature class and have never forgotten how the first American settlers praised God for enclosing the “savages” in a small area so that they could kill and burn them easily.

The quote from William Bradford’s journal:  “It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them.”

What a country.

I came across this photo while looking for images to put on a cover for a 1957 compilation CD I’m making to celebrate the 50th wedding anniversary of the parents of a friend of mine.

What could be more American than the combination of a mushroom cloud with a pinup girl?

For more information about the woman in the photograph, the photographer, and when and where it was taken, go here.

And check out the CONELRAD page about this CD/DVD collection titled Atomic Platters – Cold War Music From The Golden Age Of Homeland Security

Here are some excerpts from an article by Ross Douthat in the newest Atlantic Monthly about the rise of religion in Europe and the rise of secularism in America.

Nothing divides the United States from Europe like religion. America has its public piety and its multitude of thriving sects, Europe has its official secularism and its empty, museum-piece churches. Ninety percent of Americans say they believe in God, while only about 60 percent of Britons, French, and Germans say the same. American politics is riven by faith-based disputes that barely exist across the Atlantic, while European debates take place under a canopy of unbelief that’s unimaginable in the United States, where polls show that a Muslim or a homosexual has a better chance of being elected president than an acknowledged atheist.

…

America’s secular turn actually began in the 1990s, though it wasn’t until 2002 that two Berkeley sociologists first noticed it. In a paper in the American Sociological Review, Michael Hout and Claude S. Fischer announced the startling fact that the percentage of Americans who said they had “no religious preference” had doubled in less than 10 years, rising from 7 percent to 14 percent of the population. This unexpected spike wasn’t the result of growing atheism, Hout and Fischer argued; rather, more Americans were distancing themselves from organized religion as “a symbolic statement” against the religious right. If the association of religiosity with political conservatism continued to gain strength, the sociologists suggested, “then liberals’ alienation from organized religion [might] become, as it has in many other nations, institutionalized.”

Five years later, that institutionalization seems to be proceeding. It’s showing up in an increasingly secularized younger generation: A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 20 percent of 18-to-25-year-olds reported no religious affiliation, up from just 11 percent in the late 1980s. …
… Indeed, the America that many secularists seem to desire looks an awful lot like the Europe of today, where politicians who mention God are a rarity, and governments keep a wary eye on “sects” that stray too far outside the mainstream.

Yet the Europe of tomorrow may look more like … the United States, with a politics that’s increasingly shaped by clashes between believers, or between belief and unbelief. Already, the Continent is experiencing a low-grade culture war, created by the collision between the religious zeal of Muslim immigrants and the secular culture that surrounds them. In flash points that range from the murder of the anti-Islamic filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in Holland, to the controversy over the supposedly blasphemous Danish cartoons, to the question of whether to admit Turkey to the EU, secular Europe has found itself in unfamiliar, God-haunted, almost American territory.

…

Religion stirs up the most controversy, a group of Harvard economists recently argued, when roughly half the population is actively religious; conflict ebbs when the devout constitute large majorities or small minorities. The more evenly divided a culture finds itself on the ultimate questions, the more likely politicians are to pursue “strategic extremism” and mobilize one side against the other.

…

America has long avoided this trap by enjoying near-universal piety; Europe, at least lately, has escaped it by cultivating near-universal skepticism. But if the religious gulf between the two continents narrows, the divides within each one are likely to open ever wider, and religious peace turn increasingly to culture war—or worse.

Just what we need… more crusades.

Hmmm… What kind of question is that?  Perhaps a little background is necessary.

Yesterday I got an email from my neighbor who is working in Iraq as a producer for ABC News.  He asked me to go check out an article he recently posted to the ABC website, so I went to the ABC News main page, and what did I find?  Anna Nicole Smith was their feature story of the day.   When will this story go away?  Why does the mainstream media pay so much attention to it?  Why does the American public pay so much attention to it?  All good questions.  I have no answers…

Which reminds me of why my neighbor is in Iraq.  He went their to cover the news.  In his latest email, he wrote that there was a rocket attack a couple days ago that must have been pretty close to him.  He said it “Scared the bejesus out of me.”

What would he be covering if he was safe at home?  Well he used to work on a lot of the stories that Americans find so fascinating like Jon Benet Ramsey and Laci Peterson, so who knows?  Maybe he’d be in Fort Lauderdale covering Anna Nicole Smith’s decomposing body.

Back to Iraq…  Here’s his story:  You Be the Commander:  Get a Sense of the Decision Facing Troops in Iraq.  After reading the story about soldiers that located two Al Qaeda operatives in a safe house, you are given two choices of action for taking them out.

A couple days ago it was Bob Marley day.  Well now it’s James Dean Day.

Here’s some dialogue from Giant.

Leslie Benedict:  Money isn’t all, you know?
Jett Rink:  Not when you’ve got it.

And later on…

Jett Rink:  My well came in, Bick.

Bick Benedict:  Fine.  That’s wonderful, Jett.

Jett:  Everybody thought I had a duster.  You all thought Spindletop and
Burkburnett was all the oil there was.

I’m here to tell you it ain’t, boy. It’s here.

There ain’t a dang thing you gonna do about it.

My well came in big, so big… And there’s more down there,
bigger wells.

I’m rich, Bick!  I’m a rich one.  I’m a rich boy.

I’m gonna have more money than you ever thought you could have.  You and the rest of you stinking sons of Benedicts.

James Dean, b. February 8, 1931

According to a new report titled Devices That Tell On You: The Nike+iPod Sport Kit and published by a group of University of Washington graduate students, the new Nike+iPod Sport Kit could lead to all sorts of secret surveillance.

Scott Saponas the lead author on the report believes that anyone could monitor someone’s activities by creating an inexpensive network of computers that would monitor the movement of the person with the Nike+iPod Sport Kit transmitter.

Apparently the Nike+iPod Sport Kit transmits up to 60 feet versus the miniscule 10 inch reach of more common RFIDs on many consumer goods.
From the Seattle P-I article:

Anyone passing by with a sensor in his or her shoe — or a sensor planted in, say, a pocket or backpack — could be tracked.

The researchers outlined a scenario in which “Marvin,” a troubled ex-boyfriend, places detectors at remote locations so he could know when “Alice,” who is carrying a sensor, enters or departs a particular place.

This story has been on the local Seattle news station and this morning on CNN. The news story even shows the students testing their theory on the UW campus. It looked scary with the students monitoring, via laptops, the subject’s movement on campus.
Ultimately, if you are thinking about using this technology to surveil or are concerned that someone would use this technology to surveil you, you should really take an honest look at your relationships and those around you. You have bigger issues than whether this is a threat or not.
In order for this to work, one must secretly plant the Nike+Ipod Sport Kit, have the technological know-how to create a small network of receivers, places to discreetly hide the receivers and protect them from the elements, and a way to retrieve the information. While the receivers could be linked up to an open WiFi connection, I doubt that this would be reliable, as I don’t know anyone who’s WiFi doesn’t regularly drop and need a reboot.

Is it possible? Yes.

Is it plausible? I don’t think so. But someone will probably try to use it.

Ultimately, I do not think this will replace traditional stalking anytime soon.

Anyone who visits this site regularly has probably noticed I haven’t posted much of anything for the past couple weeks.  It could be because I’ve been extremely busy with real work, or it could be because of this internet toy called Line Rider.  Check it out.  You’ll find that you can amuse yourself with it for way, way too long.

I have a seven-year old son who introduced me to it, and he’s been at it for hours.  He of course provides his own sound effects for every bump and crash that is endured by the poor passenger on the sled.

After you’ve played with it for a while, go here to see what people who have way too much spare time can do with it.

Last night I watched the season premiere of Lost on my DVR.

I am glad that I recorded it because right away there was a scene where a cd was being put into the cd player and I thought to myself, ‘hey that’s the Talking Heads, cool’.  Only when the song started, it wasn’t.  So, I ‘jumped’ the video back and sure enough, there was a short clip of the inside of the jewel case and it was the Talking Heads Speaking in Tongues. I chalked it up to a lack of continuity, but Torleif over at p7389 thinks that it was due to the cds being put away in the wrong cases.  Funny how so much happened in this episode, but this small point is what I chose to write about…
Over at And Found, you will find a list of what the season premiere revealed.   This site is also a great source for reminding yourself what happened in previous episodes, as well as providing several ‘theories’ about what is going on.

Can’t wait to see how the season unfolds.