Letter to the Editor: Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrr you planning on another No Quarter November? Aye or No? Todd -- Doug responds: Todd, that would be an aye. Letter ...
Tuesday and Letters Just Go Together
Chasing Butterfly Ghosts
“Cool is one of the major factors driving the modern economy. Cool has become the central ideology of consumer capitalism . . . Malcolm Gladwell enumerated what he took to be the three cardinal rules of cool. First, the quicker the chase, the quicker the flight. That is, as soon as we thing we’ve discovered cool, it slips away. Second, cool can’t be manufactured out of thin air. While companies may be able to intervene in the cycle of cool, they cannot initiate it themselves. When we add to these the last rule—that you have to be cool to know cool—cool becomes a closed loop, a hermetic circle in which not only is it impossible to either make or catch cool, but it is impossible to know what it is. Unless, that is, one is already cool, in which case you have no reason to look for it in the first place”
Nation of Rebels, pp. 188-189
No Piglet Tails Here
[Speaking of behemoth] “The NIV provides us with an informative footnote which explains that this may possibly be the hippopotamus or elephant—with a tail like a cedar. Apparently the scholars who worked on the NIV were too busy with their studies as children, and never made it to the zoo, or the circus”
Forgotten Heavens, p. ix
A Red Lady Bug, With Black Dots
Introduction: So regular readers with good memory skills should be able to recall that I have tangled before with a woman named Rachel Green Miller a time or two. Or three. One example of that was ...
Audio Reading of Post
Making Conservatism Deeply Subversive
“Rebellion is not a threat to the system, it is the system.”
Nation of Rebels, p. 175
Not Empty at All
“The Creator of all is not an impersonal force, and the creation reflects that. The biblical view of the cosmos is not the one of modernity—infinite depths of lifeless space punctuated by dead rock, or chaotic fire.”
Forgotten Heavens, p. viii
Douglas Has a Close Call
Obvious When You Think About It
“This is why the hippies didn’t need to sell out in order to become yuppies. It’s not that the system ‘co-opted’ their dissent, it’s that they were never really dissenting.”
Nation of Rebels, p. 158
And So Has to be Much More Careful With That Exegesis
“On some issues, the theological liberal is better able to state what the teaching of the Bible is. This is because he is able to say, for example, the apostle Paul thought this way, and wasn’t it quaint? The evangelical, on the other hand, is required to believe whatever Paul taught in the Scriptures; the conservative is stuck with the results of his exegesis”
Forgotten Heavens, p. vii
Let Them Eat Carob Cake
“Organic food is simply the latest category of ‘premium’ consumer goods . . . Organic food is one of the major forces driving the return to an almost aristocratic class structure in the United States, in which the wealthy no longer eat the same food as the poor.”
Nation of Rebels, p. 154