I recently wrote about a documentary Park Avenue that used the game of Monopoly to illustrate some facts about capitalism. Mack, the same guy who called my attention to that video, sent me to the very short video embedded below, Back in the Box. It is just some graphics put together to go along with a three and half minute talk by John Ortberg, author of When the Game Is Over, It All Goes Back in the Box.

In this case, the video uses the game of Monopoly to illustrate the most important fact about life. There are two ways to think about this, I think. On a profound, but simple level, it is about stuff. I’m not that interested in stuff. On a more complex level, it is about who we are. And this is what I care about. Two and a half years ago, I wrote about this very briefly:

But there is more to it than this. While other people fear death, I take great solace from it. I have no illusions that my life is a particularly important work of art. But it could be just terrible. I could have taken fairly good materials and made a total mess of them. But within 75 years at the most, it will not matter in the least. And that makes me feel much better.

Regardless of what you have that you will have to put back in the box, I think you’ll enjoy this short video:

Your name is Elinor. Your sister Marianne is sick because she was dumped by the love of her life and wandered in a storm. You are watching over her—fearful that she may die. There is a knock at the door. It is John Willoughby—your sister’s philandering ex. He must see her! But you won’t allow it. She is too sick. He will tell you his tale of woe and asks that you tell Marianne. You say you will, if you think it is right. You say this, because in your own way, you are a bitch.

It is quite a tale, the details of which are not important. Except for this: the story will make your sister feel much better. Willoughby really did and still does love her! What’s more: he is now stuck in a terrible marriage with a woman he can’t stand. He leaves, you tell Marianne, and she gets better.

This is very moving. You can imagine how great it would be in a movie. There is a storm outside. A loud knock echos through the mostly empty house. In steps a soaking wet Willoughby, half crazed. It’s great in a book, but in a movie it could be overpowering. But if you watched Emma Thompson’s 1995 film based on Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, you were not overpowered. This is because Thompson chose to deal with this sequence in a very strange way. She got rid of Willoughby’s entire scene. Before Marianne is even sick, Colonel Brandon mentions that he has learned that Willoughby was planning to propose to Marianne, and thus he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. Then Marianne gets sick. And finally, Marianne gets better for no particular reason.

I have no idea why the very smart and capable Emma Thompson made this change. It introduces a fundamental flaw into what would normally be quite a good film. What is supposed to be the climax of the story, from which the plot resolves itself, is instead this 5 minute sequence where Emma Thompson is shot from various angles looking very concerned. There is a technical tern for this: boring. But it is more than that: it’s wasteful and it deprives Willoughby of his very best scene.

Nonetheless, the film is quite good. Hugh Grant as Edward is wonderfully twitchy and nervous. Alan Rickman as Colonel Brandon is perfect as the guy any woman should love but just doesn’t. Kate Winslet is perfectly annoying as Marianne—although I’m not sure that’s acting. And as I implied above, Emma Thompson is very good at standing around looking concerned. Of course, it is all leading up to this sweet and funny scene that is entirely typical of most of the film:

And yes: it makes me cry and laugh at the same time, which is (Repeat after me) charming and not pathetic!

Now that McCotter has left Congress, I’m not sure what he is going to do. Unfortunately, he was replaced by someone as bad or perhaps worse than he is. But perhaps it is a boon to the music industry. “Conservative Rock” could certainly use the help.

A year and a half ago, I wrote that Thaddeus McCotter should leave the House and do music full time:

Here he is with a kind of Fox News house band. I still think that McCotter is rather good (despite this performance), but this band isn’t. Have you ever heard a full tilt rock number like this sound so anemic?

I don’t know that much about Lincoln. But I do know a fair amount about his assassin. This is primarily because he was the brother of the great Shakespearean actor Edmund Booth. And knowing what I know, the flaming rhetoric of people like Ted Nugent concerns me greatly.

Most people pass off the right wing’s talk of tyranny and socialism as nothing but overblown rhetoric. But there is a consequence of this. Booth and all of his comrades spoke the equivalent language about Lincoln. In his mind, killing the president was not a crazy thing. He was surprised that the people did not rise up and proclaim him a hero.

This is why the right wing echo chamber most concerns me. I don’t think that Ted Nugent would try to kill the president. (Although it isn’t out of the question: John Wilkes Booth was a minor star like Nugent.) The problem is that when viewers only hear others calling President Obama a tyrant, they can very easily believe that it is not only true, but is also what everyone believes. And that is very dangerous.

Of course, others might note that I commonly say that the Republicans are a proto-fascist party. I think there are two key differences. First, I never call for violence; I flirt terribly with pacifism. Second, I never claim that my beliefs are what everyone believes. And third, I am making a fine distinction. I don’t claim that the Republican Party is a Nazi group or that they are even fascists. They have fascist tendencies: nationalism, crony capitalism, anti-egalitarianism, anti-science, anti-minority. They aren’t to full-blow fascism yet and hopefully they never will be.

There is a fundamental difference between being the loyal opposition and, well, the disloyal opposition. The loyal opposition takes it for granted that the other party may be terribly wrong about policy, but they are not trying to destroy our very democracy. Of course, such disloyal opposition causes the Republican Party to do things that make the Democrats mistrust their motivations as well. Witness the “voter fraud” campaign of the Republicans. Because they believe that real Americans could never vote for that Kenyan socialist baby killer Barack Obama, they want to invalidate the whole concept of democracy. Many of them, anyway.

But the bigger issue is that such talk and behavior on the right can and does lead to violence. I feel very confident that the Secret Service are able to protect the president. But what of others not so highly placed? For many people the only reason they are Republicans is that they believe (wrongly) that Democrats want to take away their guns. Given that, there’s no end of nonsense that can be drilled into their heads. Take Byron Williams, for example. He is the guy who was going to assassinate the people at the Tides Foundation because he believed that Glenn Beck was singling for him to do this. In the interview with Media Matters, Williams did not seem insane. His reading of Beck’s ranting seems reasonable to me.

And that is the problem.

I just read The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems by Robert M. Price. I was disappointed that the book was not an integrated overview, but a large number of papers that Price had previously written. In terms of covering the whole subject, the best chapter is the second: “Jesus at the Vanishing Point.” Unfortunately, I had already read this in the excellent The Historical Jesus : Five Views.

The majority of the book is taken up with Price’s very detailed “New Testament Narratives as Old Testament Midrash” from Encyclopedia of Midrash. At over 200 pages, this is an excellent resource, but not exactly fun reading. And honestly, I just browsed it.

The most interesting part of the the book was Price’s paper at the 2007 “Scripture and Skepticism” conference: “James the Just: Achilles’ Heel of Christ Myth Theory?” In this chapter, he lays out what seems to be the most compelling argument against the Christ Myth Theory: the Caliphate of James. Basically, this is the idea that there was a power struggle for who was the natural successor to Jesus after his death. As Price points out, there are lots of recent examples of this kind of thing. The conflict between James and Peter is much like what one saw, for instance, after the death of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad in the Nation of Islam. The argument is that there would have been nothing to fight over if Jesus had not actually existed. There are many counter arguments to this, but it is a reasonably strong argument.

For people who are really interested in this subject, the book is a must buy. For those new to the subject, it is pretty technical. On the other hand, there aren’t really any good, simple introductions to the subject. You really have to just jump in and try to get up to speed on the subject. I’ve found that’s worked well enough for me. It is also good to listen to Price’s podcast The Human Bible.

And Now for Something Completely Different

The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems is published by American Atheist Press—a small press out of New Jersey. I’m fine with that; the more publishers, the better. But I do wish that these companies would learn the basics of their trade. The typesetting of this book is horrible. Text is constantly pushed together to make it hard to distinguish between new text and quotes, footnotes are often not clearly distinguished, line spacing is inconsistent. It is just a mess and it offends me. Interestingly, the ebook looks pretty good. But if you are going to sell printed books, don’t be an embarrassment to hundreds of years of a great tradition!

Look! Out in the right wing echo chamber! It’s a tax cut proposal?! It’s a birth control ban?! No! It’s another appeal to conservatives to seem reasonable without changing a God damned thing!

Yes, the “let’s all speak nicely about Latinos”: argument from a fantasy land far away, come to reality hoping to obfuscate, distract, and deceive the American people.

Katrina Trinko over at National Review writes, Huntsman’s Problem Wasn’t Just That He Was Perceived as a Moderate. That title gives you the wrong impression, however. Really what’s she’s saying is that Huntsman’s policies were mostly to the right of Romney. The problem was that he just seemed too damned reasonable!

Trinko goes on to note that Huntsman didn’t run a good campaign, but this is a minor complaint. He could easily run a stellar campaign next time. After all, if he had just stayed in the race, at some point, like all the others, he would have surged ahead in the polls. And given that he actually was a real politician, he might have stayed there.

What Trinko seems to be offering is the idea that if Republicans can just hold their noses and vote for a candidate who doesn’t pander to their vile ideal, they might get a really conservative candidate who can win. This all comes down to the argument conservatives have been making since the election: it is the style rather than the substance of their policies that are scaring minority voters away. But no: it’s really is the substance.

I’m not one of those who think that the Democrats are home free now. Republicans will continue to win low-turnout elections. But for the majority of voters, their ideas are toxic. And it doesn’t matter how much they dress up these ideas. Even in a Superman cape, they just won’t fly.

Matt Yglesias has been writing a bit about about these business owners who are whining that the ACA (Obamacare) is just going to destroy their businesses. In particular, he highlighted John Metz, owner of more than 30 Denny’s restaurant franchises, he said he was going to add a 5% “Obamacare surcharge” on all customer bills. Because he’s such a charming motherfucker, he added that the customers could take the surcharge out of the server tip, because after all: they’re “the primary beneficiary of Obamacare.”

These comments didn’t sit too well with the CEO of Denny’s. John Miller had a private meeting with Metz and afterward said that he was “disappointed” in Metz. Yesterday, Metz released a statement that he regretted his remarks. There is a proximate reason for Miller’s swift action, of course: people were talking boycott and were generally pissed off at Denny’s. But I think there’s more to this. So does Yglesias.

Matt Yglesias puts it this way:

I agree with all of this, but I don’t think this is the main issue—or at least this isn’t the way that I would put it. This is all about demographics. If everyone in this country voted, Democrats could win every election by a landslide. Everyone doesn’t vote, of course, so Republicans do okay. But everyone does go out to eat from time to time. What’s more, the people who go out to Denny’s tend toward the poor. These are people who are going to be most hostile to a partisan Republican stunt like blaming part of the cost of the mean on President Obama.

Yglesias is correct, that everything that Metz said is likely to offend everyone—even Republicans. But had he said nothing and just added the surcharge, it might have tickled the 30% of his clientele who are Republican. But the 70% Democrats would find it offensive and perhaps choose another of the similar low-cost dining choices.

But I’m still planning to boycott all Denny’s in Florida just in case the money might go to this fucktard John Metz.

Do you remember Jules in Pulp Fiction, when he’s talk to Big Brain Brett? “You read the Bible, Brett? Well there’s this passage I got memorized—sort of fits this occasion. Ezekiel four nine: take wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and spelt; put them in a storage jar and use them to make bread for yourself. You are to eat it during the 390 days you lie on your side.” Don’t remember it? Well, that’s because he didn’t say it. He quoted Ezekiel 25:17, although most of what Jules quotes if not actually in the Bible.

Why do I bring up Ezekiel 4:9? And why would someone lie on his side for 390 days? Frankly, I have no answer to the second question—it has something to do with surviving a siege. But the answer to the first is: bread. Andrea told me she came upon some bread in the grocery store from a company called Food For Life with a product line named “Ezekiel 4:9.” That got me interested.

I figured the company must either be Jewish or right-wing born again Christian. If the former, I was okay about it. If it was the latter, I figured it was some company trying to make a point, and I was not okay about it. Does that make me anti-Christian? No. I’m just as much against literalist Judaism; it’s just that one doesn’t see such nonsense very often in modern America.

So I went over to the Food For Life website, and I found that I was probably wrong. If I had to guess, I would say that they are hippy Christians. They’re all animal, yeast, and gluten free. They specialize in foods so good for you that you could eat marble and still be able to set your watch by your bowel movements.

They also offer a product line called “Genesis 1:29.” (I’ll let you look up that one!) So these people are pretty serious about this stuff. Then again, they aren’t that serious about it: they’ve trademarked both Bible verses. And they have a dove as part of their logo. So I’m sticking with the hippy label. Of course, this doesn’t mean these are defenders of the poor. I know a number of hippy business owners and they’re are still, you know, business owners.

I won’t be buying any Food For Life products, however. It isn’t because of their religious beliefs. I once tried to be healthy by eating only sprouted wheat and all of that. It almost killed me.

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