Got Jesus Camp?

A few days ago, Fiend mentioned Jesus Camp, a documentary about an evangelical Christian "education" camp for children in which 9 and 10 year olds are drilled for their future role in "spiritual warfare", including, reportedly, praying to a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush. (Wikipedia entry here; official site here but apparently malfunctioning; distributor's site here.) Shortly afterward I heard it mentioned on the radio.

From the New York Times:

“Extreme liberals who look at this should be quaking in their boots,” declares Pastor Becky Fischer with jovial satisfaction in the riveting documentary “Jesus Camp.” Ms. Fischer, an evangelical Christian, helps run Kids on Fire, a summer camp in Devils Lake, N.D., that grooms children to be soldiers in “God’s army.”

A mountainous woman of indefatigable good cheer, Ms. Fischer makes no bones about her expectation that the growing evangelical movement in the United States will one day end the constitutional ban separating church and state. And as the movie explores her highly effective methods of mobilizing God’s army, that expectation seems reasonable.

Ms. Fischer understands full well that the indoctrination of children when they are most impressionable (under 13 and preferably between 7 and 9) with evangelical dogma is the key to the movement’s future growth, and she compares Kids on Fire to militant Palestinian training camps in the Middle East that instill an aggressive Islamist fundamentalism. The term war, as in culture war, is repeatedly invoked to describe the fighting spirit of a movement already embraced by 30 million Americans, mostly in the heartland.

Unfortunately, it looks like it's not being shown in any theaters in Michigan at the moment. The distributor indicates that it will play in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, on October 6. (I also note that it's scheduled to be shown in Grand Rapids in early November. I wonder what kind of reception will await it there?)

Has anyone seem the movie? And can anyone provide any more details or reactions?

(Added note: the user-created list of "liberal-friendly" and "liberal-unfriendly" places that supplied the page about Grand Rapids cited above makes for interesting perusal in its own right.)

Unsurprising news

Yet another Republican pedophile. The GOP seems to have become the Party of Pedophilia, as well as the Party of Lies, Corruption, Torture, etc.

This time it's the congressman who headed up the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children. Is anyone surprised by this stuff anymore? Can we please get rid of these greasy, self-serving hypocrites this November? Please?

Perhaps Mr. Foley should be visited by Dokuro-Chan, the Club-to-Death Angel featured in a very bizarre Japanese anime show that was shown in the wee morning hours at this year's Penguicon.

Speaking of which....

I suppose I should thank Representative Foley for reminding me of this horribly hilarious little gem of psychedelic ultraviolence.

For a description of the show, see the Wikipedia entry. The very weird and disturbingly funny intro sequence is available from YouTube. And if you think that's weird and disturbing seeing it on your computer screen, try watching it on a big screen at 2 am in a darkened room surrounded by costumed and caffeine-buzzed science-fiction fans.

Sadly, it does not seem to be available through Amazon or Netflix. If it were, I'd be tempted to buy a copy just so I could prove to disbelieving listeners that yes, it really does exist, and yes, it really is as twisted as it sounds.

Letting me know just how qualified I am.

Received by e'mail today:

We appreciate your interest, and patience, in the reference position at the University of (midwestern state and town).

After a review process of many qualified applicants that began in late July, the search process to fill the open reference librarian and coordinator of library instruction position in the (name) Library of the University of (midwestern state and town) has been completed. A recent graduate of the University of (southern state), (name omitted), has accepted our invitation to join the reference staff.

Recent reads

Convergent Series, by Larry Niven. A collection of short stories including selections from Niven's earlier collection The Shape of Space. Several of the later ones not included in that collection seem to be linked to a fictional futuristic bar called the Draco Tavern in which humans and aliens meet, sometimes amicably, sometimes not so much so.

I looked into this collection because B./ Yam recently referred to the story "One Face". Although Niven is considered to be the godfather of hard SF, many of the stories are fantastical or satirical in nature. The title story, for example, describes the dilemma of a modern-day amateur warlock who summons a demon as part of an experiment, and then must find some safe and logical way to un-summon it without being carried off to the nether realms. Some, like the short little anti-crime revenge-fantasy "The Deadlier Weapon", are set in the unadorned modern world with no SFnal trappings whatsoever.

On the whole, a fair selection of light reading.

I couldn't help but notice that Niven re-used distinctive terms and concepts. Why the repeated references to people dying of ruptured pancreases, for example?

Basic stuff

... by which I mean Basic, the computer language. A discussion on Making Light, plus this page about so-called Classic Basic programs, got me thinking again about the way that I used to be able to write simple programs for the Apple II computer. Nothing complicated, really, no three-D graphics or interactive video or anything like that. Just simple logical constructions that would, say, generate a set of random numbers or text values within certain parameters, or allow the user to follow a branching path of decisions, or create & compile simple datasets like game characters, or (more to the point of my current needs) generate randomized daily switching lists for a model railroad. B./Yam will no doubt remember the sort of things I'm talking about.

Is there a way to easily replicate this functionality with present-day computers?

Added note: Came across a page of links to "free BASIC compilers", but am clueless about what exactly "compilers" are or what to do with them. Duhhhh.

The kind of e'mail links I get from relatives

"In God We Still Trust", by Diamond Rio.

My response, for what it's worth:

I'll agree that the song is tuneful and harmonious, but as you probably know, I find the idea of a Christian theocracy to be no more attractive than the idea of a Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Mormon, or any other kind of religious theocracy. It's anti-American ("Congress shall make no law....") as well as anti-Christian ("Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars, and unto God those things that are God's...")

The fact that there IS separation between religion and politics in America is the only thing that has prevented Christianity in this county from getting any more beslimed by sleazy politicians than it has, kept religious belief genuine and personal instead of merely a social/political obligation, and quite possibly the only thing that has prevented us from having the kind of sadistic religious wars and inquisitions that plagued Europe in the middle ages and plague the Middle East today.

"There is no separation (between church and state)" is a sentiment more typical of, say, the Ayatollah Khomeini, or Osama bin Laden, than of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson! Falsely suggesting, through the use of inflammatory images of someone burning an American flag, that anyone who opposes Christian theocracy is anti-American is a propaganda ploy worthy of Joseph Goebbels. And displaying an image of the Constitution, with its famous bill of rights prohibiting religious favoritism, while implying that theocracy is "what this country's all about", is either comically clueless or deliberately deceitful.

So. Pretty song, but ugly sentiment.

Sometimes I wonder whether it's worth talking back to the marching sheep who keep bleating out "Four legs good two legs bad."

Recent reads

Tamsin, by Peter Beagle. Well, it may not be The Last Unicorn or Come Lady Death, but Beagle is in fine form with this gothicly ghostly story. An teenage American girl is brought, much against her will, to live in a crumbling old mansion in the English countryside -- one of those Gormenghastly old places where the number of windows on the outside walls don't necessarily match the number visible on the inside walls. Things start to get strange when her cat takes up with a feline "girlfriend" with a disturbingly translucent aspect, and when Jenny meets Tamsin, a girl who lived and died in the mansion over three hundred years ago, they start to get very strange indeed.

The plot may sound hackneyed when described so shortly, but Beagle keeps the story gripping. Jenny is a believably naive and alienated teenager, and the story of Tamsin and her connection to some very dark events from the past is developed in a gradual and convincing fashion. I was even willing to forgive a kind of deus ex machina at the conclusion of the tale. A good read.

Recent listens

Lost in the Forest, by Sue Miller. A slow-moving, excruciatingly minutely observed chronicle of a family tragedy. Perhaps it would have been more gripping if the author did not continually describe her characters' thoughts and emotional reactions in distant, third-person prose.

Recent reads

Before Lewis and Clark : the story of the Chouteaus, the French dynasty that ruled America's frontier, by Shirley Christian. I can't claim that I read all of this book in detail. I skimmed through some of the later chapters, due to lack of reading time. My interestin the book was prompted by the fact that I recognized the names associated with the Chouteau-Laclede-Labadie group of families because a number of towns and counties in Missouri and Oklahoma are named after them.

In addition to the history of the Chouteau family and its influence over fur trading, Indian relations, and the early economic and political development of St. Louis, the book discusses the Osage Indians, their primary Indian trading partners, at some length. Although the US Army's later conflicts with the Sioux and Cheyenne got more press, it's clear that the Osages were a power to be reckoned with in their day. Early travellers reported that few men of the tribe were less than six feet tall, with heads shaved and blazoned scarlet except for a "mohawk"-style scalplock. They had access to the tough wood of the "beau des arces" (present-day "Bodarc") tree to make superior bows, and they took full advantage of their strategic location near the trading posts at St. Louis and along the Missouri river to obtain weapons and tools that other tribes did not have.

Unfortunately, the US politicians and political appointees who show up late in the game, after the Louisiana Purchase, are about as grasping and shortsighted as their present-day counterparts. Both the Chouteaus and the Osages were gradually pushed out of the key positions they had held. (Christian mentions briefly, in an afterword, the riches that came to the surviving Osages much later in the twentieth century, when their desolate reservation in Oklahoma turned out, to everyone's surprise, to have major oil reserves.)

Recent viewings

Burning Man : Beyond Black Rock. It's amazing how much organization is necessary in order to host a festival of anarchy.

Sledge Hammer, season 1, disc 2. And the hits just keep coming. So to speak.

But still, they evolve

From Bookslut's 2004 list of book-banning attempts:

Horses, by Juliet Clutton Brook. A parent of an eight-year-old student at Smith Elementary School in Helena, MT, challenged the presence of Clutton-Brock's book about horses in the school's library because it supported the theory of evolution....

News noted

US drops from 1st to 6th most competitive nation, according to the World Economic Forum. Shaky public finances and trade deficits are mentioned as contributing causes.

Will the next election be hacked? (from Rolling Stone.)

People I do not want to be

Inside a tortured mind (Attributed to Time Magazine, Dec. 2 1985)

Portrait of an eccentric who obsessively chronicled his daily thoughts and activities for 45 years. For reasons best known to itself, Harvard assigned a professor to edit the resulting monstrosity and published it.

Herr Teufelsdrock, eat your heart out....

Want a job doing reconstruction work in Baghdad?

You don't need to speak or understand Arabic. Nor do you need any expertise in accounting, public health, police work, etc., in order to secure a high-paying, prestigious position in those fields. All you have to do is be a Republican yes-man, or the daughter of one.

Quoth the Washington Post:

After the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans -- restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O'Beirne's office in the Pentagon.

To pass muster with O'Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration.

O'Beirne's staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade .

Many of those chosen by O'Beirne's office to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq's government from April 2003 to June 2004, lacked vital skills and experience. A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance -- but had applied for a White House job -- was sent to reopen Baghdad's stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq's $13 billion budget, even though they didn't have a background in accounting.....

Obviously Michael D. Brown, the Bush apparatchik who, as head of FEMA, e'mailed amiably with his officemates and proclaimed himself a "fashion god" while New Orleans drowned, isn't an isolated case. There are a lot of Republicans out there doing a heck of a job.

Washed up has-been sues small SF publisher

Make of this what you will. The actual complaint in all its deranged, petty glory is available here.

Apparently the washed-up has-been, who's been coasting his way through science fiction conventions for the past thirty years or so on the basis of a few well-regarded short stories and television episodes written in his youth, plus a couple of SF anthologies that he edited in the same period, has lately been reduced to groping women in public and filing frivolous lawsuits like this in a desperate attempt to stay in the limelight that he so pathetically craves.

One suspects that his real gripe with Fantagraphics is that they have published books such as The Book on the Edge of Forever, which describe in excruciatingly documented detail the incompetence and sociopathic egotism that has characterized his life and projects ever since the first, brief flowering of genuine ability that made his reputation.

Religion and violence, yet again

Some insightful words from Der Spiegel and The (London) Times on the latest squabble over whether dhimmis should be allowed to criticize fanatical Islamists who seek world domination through murder and intimidation.

What's in a name?

Astronomical types have been all a-twitter for the past few weeks about a redefinition of "planet" which had the effect of expelling the object-formerly-known-as-a-planet Pluto from the august fraternity of planets.

Turns out the distant orbiting body which made all this fuss necessary has received a new identity, too. Its discoverer called it "Xena", and its small moon "Gabrielle", for reasons which should be obvious to any student of recent American pop culture. Unfortunately, that's not good enough for the International Astronomical Union, which on Wednesday officially renamed it Eris after the Greek goddess of strife and discord, best known in mythology for offering a golden apple to the "most beautiful" of the three goddesses Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena, prompting a divine feud that led to the Trojan War.

Still, the original namesake may get the last ki-yi-yi after all. The newly-rechristened dwarf planet's neighbor has been officially titled Dysnomia, after the mythological spirit of lawlessness.

Recent Reads

Bijapur : Blood of the Goddess. In the second volume of Kara Dalkey's historical fiction trilogy, the story moves from the Christian Portuguese colony of Goa to the interior of 17th century India, a thicket of religious and political intrigue between ruling Mughals, native "Hindoos", and encroaching Christians, as well as between feuding petty states and an expanding centralized empire. Eroticism, treachery, and dangers both physical and spiritual await Dalkey's reluctant hero as he travels ever closer to the source of the mysterious, miraculous drug known as the "blood of the goddess" -- and as his reason for doing so becomes more personal and more compelling.

Above average historical adventure fiction, with more eroticism than in the previous volume as the story moves out of the shadow of the brutal and corrupt Goanese office of the Inquisition and into the more openly sensual culture outside its influence.

Oriana Fallaci, RIP.

A fire-breathing reporter, interviewer and essayist. Whatever faults she may have had, she was never boring. (LA Times, NY Times, etc.)

Ann Richards, RIP.

Former Texas governor. Obits here and here and probably elsewhere as well.

Coming soon to a black market near you

The Studio Ghibli anime production of Tales from Earthsea seems to be going great guns in Japan. See also this article .

Further clarification for those of us in the U.S. may have to wait a good long while. Although Locus states that "the strong opening in Japan means that US distribution could happen relatively quickly", the LA Times reporter states that "the film screened at the Venice Film Festival in Italy on Sunday but cannot have a release in the U.S. until an American TV series' copyright expires in 2009." I suspect that the reporter is confused about terminology. Any existing copyright will last effectively in perpetuity, thanks to our Congress's slavish obedience to its Hollywood masters. Perhaps this is a confused reference to some kind of contract giving a certain company the exclusive right to distribute broadcast productions of LeGuin's stories in the US for a specified length of time?

Wikipedia's current entry on the film suggests that this is, indeed, the case. So until 2009, unless our neofeudal Copyright Barons resolve their feud amicably, keep an eye on those black- and grey-market DVD sources if you want to see this one.

Republican plans for this fall's election:

Sling mud.

Well, when your party's tenure has been disastrous in every conceivable way, both abroad and at home, party leaders have had to resign in disgrace over their open corruption, and you're entirely out of useful ideas of any type whatsoever, I suppose that's about all that's left.

Look for more sleazy whispering campaigns, such as the Ohio GOP's recent demands that a Democratic candidate prove he's not gay.

News noted

Peter Jackson's next project, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

" 'Temeraire' is a terrific meld of two genres that I particularly love -- fantasy and historical epic," Jackson said. "I can't wait to see Napoleonic battles fought with a squadron of dragons. That's what I go to the movies for."

And I'm back

... from Canada and from a day doing inventory at the library of a tiny remote branch campus of Busy Bee College. Saw a couple of movies (Bon Cop, Bad Cop and An Inconvenient Truth, about which more later.) Took a daytrip up to Kingston, which reminds me of another pleasantly somnolent Great Lakes port city I've known. Gawked at impressive Fort Henry, whose guns and parapets loom menacingly from a point of land just east of the harbor.











Took a pleasant three hour tour (... "a three-hour tour"...) through the lovely scenery and the surreal vacation cottages of the Thousand Islands:































(Island photos courtesy of Fiend.)

Recent reads

Greenhouse Summer, by Norman Spinrad. It's sometime in the twenty-first century. Global climate change has resulted in the melting of planetary icecaps, and low-lying areas like Louisiana have been inundated by rising sealevels. Much of Africa has been swallowed by the rapaciously expanding Sahara.

But not everyone is suffering. In every age, it seems, it's better to be lucky... or rich. Siberia has become a golden agricultural paradise; Paris exists in a year-round perpetual summer. New York has constructed massive seawalls to keep Manhattan habitable in the midst of the warm, shallow ocean that surrounds it, swamping the ruins of the outlying boroughs. (The local seafood is famous.) The Gulf Stream is kept going through artificial assistance from orbital mirrors funded by industrialized Europe. And for the Big Blue Machine, the unofficial global consortium of multinational corporations that hawk climate-altering technology to the desperate governments of the so-called Lands of the Lost, business has never been better.

Our Heroine, Monique Calhoun, works for a major international public-relations company called Bread & Circuses. She's made a splash by facilitating some very difficult projects for Big Blue clients. Now she has a chance to work for the United Nations, organizing its next Annual Conference On Climates Stabilization in glorious Paris. It's a grand opportunity to impress her superiors and boost her career into the stratosphere.

Or is it?

Strange things are afoot. The conference is spending far more money than the penurious UN could ever afford; some of the people invited to speak at the conference are well beyond "eccentric"; and both the crime-oriented Big Boys syndicate and the recently-privatized Mossad are sniffing around as if they smell something irresistible in the air.

Skulduggery, spying, and murky moral decisions abound as the plot thickens. Al Gore meets John Le Carre in a convoluted plot of assassinations, hypocritical stage-managed political theater, and dubious science. Spinrad casts cynical doubt on the motivations of practically every human being and organization in the book, while never slighting the moral seriousness of the consequences of their actions, which after all is visible in the global climatological trainwreck occuring all around. Certain passages of the book sound almost like a premonition of Joel Bakan's The Corporation, with the repeated theme that most organizations, either corporate or governmental, are inherently incapable of making and executing long-term plans in a responsible fashion. Can individual responsibility, at any level, alter that sinister mechanism? And at what cost?

Carlos will be displeased

Longtime Rock Critic, Christgau, Axed at 'Village Voice' in Latest Layoffs