Tasty Tidbits 9/27/11

Christianity generally, Corporatism, eulogy, Food, Political Matters 2 Minutes
  1. Apocalypse 2012?
  2. Dilbert on the Presidential Campaign.
  3. Rest in Peace, uh, whatever your name was.
  4. “The last best hope of earth.”
  5. Food, Inc. and its jackbooted thugs.
  6. Hypocrites and fanatics.

My early-week schedule leaves me precious little time to do more than grab, link, and run. Sorry.

1

Except for the snotty last sentence (with the gist of which I happen to agree), I find little to fault in this New York Times Op-Ed on the history of the characteristic apocalyptic views of of many “conservative Christians.”

It’s “man bites dog” when the NYT gets a religion story roughly right, and they had to bring in a ringer to pull it off, but I’ll take what I can get.

2

Dilbert creator Scott Adams makes a political point in regular prose. (HT WSJ)

3

I think I should be missing the late Carl Oglesby, if only I could actually remember his while he was alive. He sounds like someone I could have enjoyed.

4

Abraham Lincoln once called America the “last best hope of earth.” It’s a requirement of politics these days to echo that, if not in those exact words.

But those words are, quite clearly, blasphemous. How dare Christians utter them?

Okay, I’ll dismount my high horse now and point you to a less polemical Christian piece about “American Exceptionalism.”

5

I picked this up from the American Conservative (TAC), which takes the radically conservative view that big concentrations of corporate power are darn near as bad a big concentrations of government power, insofar as one can distinguish the two these days:

Everyone who cares about how our food is grown and raised is invited to the table.  The only people with whom we won’t engage are individuals or organizations that don’t believe in the right and need for all forms of today’s agriculture to exist, or our affiliates’ right to exist.

This is the slick line of big AgriBiz, sarcastically quoted by TAC, speaking through its shill the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance (USFRA) about its program called “The Food Dialogues.”

Such a deal! How can we turn that down? “Let’s compromise our way: we’ll talk pretty while the government that funds us sends in jackbooted thugs to drive sustainable agriculture out of business.”

6

Christian hypocrisy: saying one thing on Sunday, doing another Monday through Saturday.

Christian fanaticism: saying something on Sunday, doing it all week.

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Bon appetit!

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