There are three mainstays in today’s Hollywood:  sex, violence and special effects.

Special effects in movies, when well done, are fun.  They help us escape from our lives to enjoy tales of superheroes, mutants or alternate realities.  We travel to faraway or mythical lands and see dragons, dwarfs and trolls, tree-creatures battling orcs, wizards and sorcerers battling.  Oh yeah, and stuff blowing up.  (Thank you Michael Bay)  None of this really exists, of course, but that’s part of what makes it a good escape for the viewer.

It’s kind of hard to imagine a major blockbuster that doesn’t involve some form of death, shock, torture, shooting or explosion.  War movies can bring perhaps the most accuracy to this genre and this is especially true of those that don’t sugar coat it.  Saving Private Ryan was very graphic but not in an over-the-top, gratuitous way.  It brought home the realities of war.  Most action movies, however, take violence to a completely unrealistic level.

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The other day our friend MentalSwitch offered up a delightful little post entitled “Hello Nurse!” It featured a photo of an attractive model dressed as … well, hell, rather than me trying to describe the shot and failing miserably, why don’t you just click on over there and see for yourself. But before you do, please be forewarned that the photo is NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!!

Ahem. Well, actually, its worksafeness (or unworksafeness thereof) became the topic of some discussion here. Initially the pic was posted without a cut, meaning that the image itself would appear on the front page of S&R. Later, after some complaint and brief deliberations, we moved it behind a cut with the dreaded “NSFW” tag, indicating that the content would most certainly get you fired if it were accidentally viewed by any decent, God-Fearing American^® co-worker. And since way too many of our readers work in places where others might be looking over their shoulders, this was a practical concern. As one colleague put it – and we’ll let that colleague name himself if he wants to – “if the wrong person had walked behind me with that image up on my screen, I could have been walked out the door that day, no appeal.” Full Story »

Modern Conservative is a powerful language, more capable than Greek or Hebrew of expressing the profound new concepts that Christianity introduced into the world. Evidently then, it needs to be applied to the Christian Canon. The perfectly revealed word of God turns out to be not-quite-perfect enough. Just kidding. It’s that liberals, feminists and maybe even Catholics have muddled the good news. You see, The Lord must have spoken Modern Conservative because he made modern conservatives in His image. It says so in the Book nearly ruined by pervasive, liberal influences.

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Not that this should come as any surprise, but we now have confirmation that the Bush administration refused to award Harry Potter author JK Rowling the Presidential Medal of Freedom because the books “encouraged witchcraft.”

For a second, let’s set aside any arguments over whether or not Rowling’s work merits such a lofty honor and do something that we simply don’t do enough these days. Let’s dig beneath the surface silliness and examine the deeper implications of what this revelation really means.

Put simply, would you be worried about “encouraging” something you didn’t think was possible? It’s one thing to want to discourage, say, meth use or binge drinking or texting while driving or unprotected sex. Those things are real and they have real, observable consequences. Full Story »

“The culture wars are over,” says journalist Charles Pierce, “and the idiots have won.”

Woe be to the rest of America.

To a rational, thinking person, the rise of idiocy in America seems like a baffling phenomenon. People laugh in the face of logic and willfully ignore facts, preferring to listen to the gut instead of the brain. Intellectuals, experts, and scientists get vilified or dismissed for having expertise. Discussion gets shouted down by anyone able to shout nonsense loud enough.

Pierce plunges into the maddening crowd to explore this phenomenon in his new book, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.

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A couple of weeks ago Slate did an entertaining if occasionally dopey series on how America might end. Frankly, SF authors have done a much better job on this theme, and it’s a bit disappointing that Josh Levin, who authored the series, spent most of his time interviewing academics and think-tank nerds and reasonable-sounding secessionists rather than speculative writers who have thought seriously about this—-because many of the commentators that he does quote don’t seem to know what they’re talking about. Sadly, this tends to weaken what would have otherwise been a pretty thought-provoking series.

A case in point is  How is America Going to End? Who’s most likely to secede? It’s kind of an interesting piece, I guess, but not nearly as interesting as it could have been. This is mainly because Levin spends virtually no time talking to the loonybirds on the hard right. Rather, he spends much of his time talking about possible natural fragmentations along ethnicity, or along geography, or along one of the metrics used by Joel Garreau in his Nine Nations of North America way back in 1981. Full Story »

If by “there” you mean … the “F” word, well, we’re probably closer than we’d like to be, aren’t we? Thoughtful and unsettling take on Fascism in America by Sara Robinson, dead ahead…

Sanford case shines a spotlight on the central paradox of marriage.

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford not only played fast and loose with the institution of marriage, but with email. However, help keeping affairs secret has arrived for not only politicians, but all of us. AshleyMadison.com just released apps for mobile phones and the Blackberry. Jeremy Caplan reports for Time that because they’re “loaded up from phones’ browsers, they leave no electronic trail.”

For those unfamiliar with it, AshleyMadison is a matchmaking service for married individuals. That’s right: It facilitates affairs. To summarize the statement of a woman Caplan quotes who consults in the online dating field, AshleyMadison is infidelity “rebranded” and made “monetizable.” Though Ashley Madison has signed up over one million users since going online in 2001, she seems concerned that it harms the online dating business for singles. Full Story »

There’s a wicked little meme is going around and it seems to have infected a lot of people we’d have hoped were immune. Unfortunately this mental and linguistic virus is particularly virulent, and left untreated it has the potential to be lethal.

I’m referring, of course, to the “Lone Wolf” Flu. It’s precisely the sort of bug we’d expect to strike conservative talk show hosts across the nation – and it has – but lately it’s turned up in what were once considered to be some of the most objective and sanitary environments in the American media landscape.

I’ll stop torturing the metaphor now, lest it seem like I’m treating the subject too lightly. Instead, let’s examine a couple of news items that do considerable damage to the truth of our domestic terror problem. First, a June 13 AP story bylined by Devlin Barrett and Eileen Sullivan came across the wires with this headline: “Shootings show threat of ‘lone wolf’ terrorists.” And yesterday the Wall St. Journal joined in with “FBI Seeks to Target Lone Extremists,” which explained that “[l]one-wolf offenders continue to be of great concern to law enforcement.” Full Story »

Two people have been shot at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. The shooter has been identified as James Wenneker von Brunn, a man with ties to various right-wing hate groups. His Web site is here.

At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, we should note that since September 11, 2001, more innocent American citizens have been killed by anti-abortion activists and other fringe right terrorists than by al Qaeda. Oddly, we’re hearing no calls from Republican legislators or party leaders like Rush Limbaugh (or their Vichy Democrat allies) demanding that we invade Coeur d’Alene.

So are we serious about terror or not?

Note: Relevant updates will posted to the bottom. By all means, read all the way to the end, where it gets interestinger and interestinger.

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Dr. George Tiller was murdered at his church this morning. According to the New York Times:

Dr. Tiller, who had performed abortions since the 1970s, had long been a lightning rod for controversy over the issue of abortion, particularly in Kansas, where abortion opponents regularly protested outside his clinic and sometimes his home and church. In 1993, he was shot in both arms by an abortion opponent but recovered.

He had also been the subject of many efforts at prosecution, including a citizen-initiated grand jury investigation. Full Story »

Break out the linguistic life jackets, folks. We’re about to be inundated with the overuse and abuse of the word mainstream with regard to President Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.

Politics is at its heart a battle for control of language and symbols. Now that the president has nominated Judge Sotomayor, [insert name of political party or faction here] will seek to [support | undercut] that nominee through [messaging | framing | "truth"]. Ideological control of mainstream, a word signifying ownership of the core values of a majority of Americans, is at stake.
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Part three of a series.

In the days following the murders at Columbine High School I visited the school and the grounds of Clement Park. Those walks produced this piece, which was originally published ten years ago today.

We have learned a great deal about the  events that took place at Columbine since  this essay was written (for instance, we now know that the  “Cassie Said Yes” story never actually happened,  and we also know that the whole “Trenchcoat Mafia”  thing was also a media-propagated fiction). But it seemed to me that going back  and revising to account for new information would damage the  fabric of what I wrote in late April and early May of 1999.  I have therefore elected to leave the factual inaccuracies  in place. I do, however, note the spots containing errors with an asterisk (*).

Salon.com and Westword.com provide as thorough and accurate  a picture as we are ever likely to have of the shootings and  the aftermath, and I recommend them highly.

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Sunday, May 2, 1999

It won’t stop raining, and nobody seems to care. Full Story »

Orson Scott Card is a barking fascist asshat. Let me illustrate.

I always marveled at how some of my friends worshiped the writing of Orson Scott Card. Maybe, I thought, it’s because we’re North Carolinians and he’s from Greensboro. From my perspective he was nothing special, at best, and has in the last couple of decades evolved into perhaps America’s most overrated science fiction author. Ender’s Game was prescient in its way – in a world where weaponry is so technologized that war is a video game, of course kids can be uber-warriors. But when the boy is made into some kind of equally uber moralist and philosopher (or whatever the hell Speaker for the Dead was about) I smelled the pungent aroma of self-indulgence that so often attends SF writers of a certain stripe.

The Alvin Maker series was even less bearable. We were doing fine in Seventh Son, clipping through an interesting enough little story (assuming you could get past the inexplicably patronizing treatment of Native American names) and then – the damnedest what the fuck passage in all of known literature. Full Story »

Part one of a series

April 20, 2009: 11:19 am MDT

Ten years ago a co-worker turned to me and said something that I’ll never forget, no matter how long I live: “Hey, Sammy, there’s been a school shooting in Littleton.”

Since that day a great deal has been written and said about Columbine High School and the events of 4.20.99, and like a lot of other people I’ve tried my hardest to make sense of something that seemed (and still seems) inherently senseless. Tried and failed. Now, ten years on, the grief hasn’t fully dissipated here in the city that I have come to call home, and even if we manage to understand the whos, whats, and hows, there’s a part of us that’s doomed to wrestle forever with the whys. Full Story »

We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas. – Natalie Maines

I don’t even know the Dixie Chicks, but I find it an insult for all the men and women who fought and died in past wars when almost the majority of America jumped down their throats for voicing an opinion. It was like a verbal witch-hunt and lynching. – Merle Haggard

Last night over dinner the subject of The Dixie Chicks came up, and I got mad all over again. Which is unfortunate, because when you think about artists that talented the last thing on your mind ought to be anger. But still, it’s been six long years now since “the top of the world came crashing down,” and I can’t quite free myself of my rage at the staggering ignorance that led so many Americans to piss on the 1st Amendment by attempting to destroy the careers of Natalie Maines, Martie Maguire and Emily Robinson. Full Story »

by John Harvin

Last night we had dinner with my daughter’s future in-laws. They are devout Christians, members of an ultra-conservative evangelical mega-church.

As we sat down to eat, they asked if anyone minded if they said grace. We smiled and went along with it, but the truth is I do mind. I think coming into someone’s home and imposing your belief system is unspeakably rude and completely unacceptable. What if I belonged to the Sacred Church of Zoophilia, and I came to dinner at your house and asked, “While you dish out the salad, do you mind if I have sex with your cat?” To me, talking aloud to Jesus and forcing me to listen in on the conversation is much the same thing. And after dinner, when the inevitable sales pitch came, we turned it away as gracefully as possible.

Marrying into an evangelical family is a very depressing prospect. Full Story »

Dear Mr. Buffet, Mr. Gates, Mr. Turner, Mr. Soros, Ms. Winfrey, and any other hyper-rich types with progressive political leanings:

If this essay has, against all odds, somehow made its way to your desk, please, bear with me. It’s longish, but it winds eventually toward an exceedingly important conclusion. If you’ll give me a few minutes, I’ll do my best to reward your patience.
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In the 2008 election, Barack Obama won a landmark political victory on a couple of prominent themes: “hope” and “change.” He has since been afforded ample opportunity to talk about these ideas, having inherited the nastiest economic quagmire in living memory and a Republican minority in Congress that has interpreted November’s results as a mandate to obstruct the public interest even more rabidly than it was doing before. Reactions among those of us who supported Obama have been predictably mixed, but even those who have been critical of his efforts to date are generally united in their hope that his win signaled the end of “movement conservatism” in the US. Full Story »

Dr. Slammy was kind enough to put up a post earlier today that shows just how un-Christian people who call themselves Christians can actually be. And then I happened to be listening to my favorite Goth crooner, Voltaire, when one of my favorite songs came on: “God Thinks”, from Voltaire’s Almost Human album. Enjoy.

God thinks all blacks are obsolete farm eqipment
God thinks the Jews killed his son and must be punished
God thinks the white man is Satan
God, they know what God thinks

God thinks we should all convert to Judaism
God thinks we must all be Christians and
God thinks we should all embrace Islam
God thinks the only true religion is Hinduism

And I
I know what God thinks
God thinks you’re a waste of flesh
God prefers an Atheist Full Story »

33And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

34Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:

35For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:

36Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

37Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?

38When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?

39Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?

40And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

- Matthew 25: 33-40

I was reminded of this little passage today as I reviewed these numbers: Full Story »